News & Analysis
Fear Rises as U.S. Officials Threaten Iran
"Diplomacy has failed," Sen. Chuck Schumer (pictured left with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), D-N.Y., told AIPAC, "Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that." ... "We have to contemplate the final option," said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., "the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon." War is a "terrible thing," said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., but "sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time." Graham then describes the war we Americans should fight: "If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion. The Iran government's ability to wage conventional war against its neighbors and our troops in the region should not exist. They should not have one plane that can fly or one ship that can float." Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, Neocon Central, writes, "The only questions remaining, one Washington politico tells me, are who starts it, and how it ends." As to who starts it, we know the answer. Teheran has not started a war in memory and is not going to launch a suicide attack on a superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons. As with Iraq in 2003, the war will be launched by the United States against a nation that did not attack us -- to strip it of weapons it does not have. – Human Events
Dominant Social Theme: Iran's provocations will not cease.
Free-Market Analysis: Again, the drums beat – and the fear and frustration in America thicken until they seem almost palpable. War is certainly a racket, as General Smedley Butler wrote, but it is one that America's power elite has deployed with grim efficiency over the past decade since 9/11. War also allows the state to take repressive domestic actions it could not otherwise justify. And so pound the drums.
Iran is the latest target, as we can see from the article excerpted above by conservative pundit Pat Buchanan. It is a timely article, though Buchanan does not attempt to put the war into a wider context but contents himself with questioning the reason for its imminence and points out how close to total war America and its allies would have to come to properly pursue such a war. In this article we wish to go a step further to put a potential Iran war into a larger perspective.
Is it indeed time for one more conflict? One more war to distract citizens of the West from their own growing police states and the great unraveling of their own economies? Certainly, the rationales offered up for war against Iran are questionable. Many nations have nuclear weapons now, but none have used them for fear of retaliation. Why would Iran be any different – assuming its braintrust even has the wherewithal to make them.
From our point of view, to ask these questions is to answer them. So let us be clear. There is no reason for America to go to war with Iran. As Buchanan points out, it is not Iran that has started numerous wars in the past decades but America. If the world has something to fear from war, it is more likely to arrive from the West than Persia. Yet all this is probably beside the point. If there is to be war, any reason will do. America's leadership may want war for domestic rather than foreign policy reasons.
America, in fact, is a troubled nation. The country is said to be rebounding from the financial crisis but the unemployment figures don't seem to confirm this. President Barack Obama's administration has been piling on one expensive new program after another even as his popularity slides to under 50 percent, according to surveys. Meanwhile, the national debt has soared to a point where observers are talking openly about whether America's credit rating may be downgraded. Gold and silver prices are increasingly expensive compared to paper money. Not only that, but if China and Europe continue their slow motion economic collapses, whatever thin American gains have been made on the economic front may be further set back.
The recent "jaw jaw about war war" is right in line with the more truculent profile that America has been showing the world since 9/11. Debate about 9/11 is not nearly resolved in America, despite lack of official discussion. Like many things that have happened since 9/11, a domestic consensus concerning that terrible attack is hard to discern among the larger American public- and lately the alternative press and the Internet have seemed more active than ever in terms of reexamining 9/11 and questioning the official story.
The 9/11 attack and lack of official clarity about what really happened (see other Bell articles on 9/11) is like a cancer at the heart of American domestic and foreign policy. In the great city of New York there is still a hole in the ground and that hole is destructive to the nation's spirit as well. America's airports are like armed camps, its federal government supports a vast apparatus of spy agencies and domestic terror departments that seem mostly aimed at the nation's own citizens. Free-speech is being further affected by increased FBI and general legal intimidation.
But leaving 9/11 aside, the electorate remains fractured and bitter. The nation's political class is despised and both its current and former president are held in active disrepute by a country that at most can summon perhaps 25 percent voter support for increasingly repressive and economically ruinous policies. The latest, possibly unconstitutional bill, rammed through a fractured national congress, "health care reform," will do nothing to heal the American political conversation or electoral schism.
And so there is war. And more war. And war is a racket.
War is also it seems the preferred solution for America's military industrial complex. America has been embroiled in wars since the end of the 1940s and the last "great war." But in the past decade the pace of war has picked up. First Afghanistan, then Iraq and perhaps, now, Iran. But a trillion dollars later, why does the US government have so little to show for its efforts?
According to insider reports, Iraq's embittered religious leaders seemingly wait for the US to leave before resuming nearly inevitable intercine violence. Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains a political and military mess. The surge that allowed the US military-industrial complex to claim a (current) putative victory in Iraq has yet to take hold in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's increasingly paranoid and isolated leader Hamid Karzai is a thin reed on which to hang American and allied hopes. Recent articles in the mainstream press have pointed out that Karzai should act like the storied French leader Charles De Gaulle during World War II, and properly support American efforts in Afghanistan, but we wonder if that is an appropriate parallel.
Karzai is Pashtun, a member of the very tribe of some 40 million that spawned the Taliban. And thus the historical precedent is perhaps inaccurate. Karzai's own people are the ones that America is fighting. He may have made the prudent assumption that his life is forfeit once America departs, and thus his efforts to reach out to the Taliban to negotiate a government of national reconciliation are perfectly understandable and even predictable.
If America wishes to install the right kind of government, it would support the ascension of an individual without Pashtun ties. But this in turn would inflame the Pashtuns further as they have historically run the area by virtue of being the largest population. It would also be unfeasible in terms of the regions politics as Iran would doubtless be drawn further into the conflict to support the Pashtuns. It is a conundrum.
There is a temptation to wonder if the American military braintrust has decided that the easiest way to cut the Gordian knot of the Middle East conflict is to attack Iran with devastating force, as Buchanan suggests – an option that was finally rejected by the Bush administration but is obviously being considered again. This would have a number of ramifications that might be seen as positive from a certain US high-level perspective. For one thing, it would turn a series of small wars into a fairly sizeable one, even a kind of world war. It would polarize the military debate and potentially set back the effective anti-war movement in Europe and the expanding one in the US.
From an economic standpoint, attacking Iran would generally wreak havoc with industrial economies around the world and thus blur the lines of current responsibility. From a security perspective, a war with Iran would probably involve an even more intensive police state in America, Britain and Europe as remnants of Iran's military and special forces fight back using various terror strategies.
From the standpoint of the Western power elite that ultimately stands behind all these actions, placing the West on a massive war footing again would potentially further regional currency goals of the powers-that-be. The financial pressure on certain failing economies in the EU might subside, and various security and economic pacts (and mergers) in the Americas – between Canada, the US and Mexico – could be further elaborated.
There is plenty of risk in launching a war against Iran. Western economies would reel; China and Russia might be drawn in. Generally a major war always has unintended consequences. But the current status quo in the West is suffering death by a thousand cuts. The Internet has increasingly exposed power elite manipulations and resistance – mostly non-violent – is growing more active in both the EU and US. The economic downturn has exacerbated people's frustration and concentrated their minds on the failed sociopolitical and economic policies that have constituted "capitalism."
Thus it is then that a larger war might well be attractive to the Anglo-American power elite, and the risks even now are doubtlessly being debated and compared to the rewards. This is no surprise. When the Gutenberg press came into its own and began to change the texture of elite governance, several wars raged intermittently like sullen brushfires for decades. It made no difference, ultimately. The changes ushered in by the Gutenberg press were unstoppable.
Nothing, in fact, is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The Internet and the free-market thinking it has spawned have already changed the West irrevocably. A larger war, even a world war of sorts will not change this reality. One cannot remove knowledge lodged in people's brains. One cannot remove tongues that speak or families and friends that listen. Eventually the power elite will be forced to take a step back as they have before. It is from our point of view inevitable.
It will not happen because of violent revolution. It will occur because of the knowledge of the sordid, elite manipulation that has taken place. People, in fact, don't like to be manipulated. They don't like being lied to. So the dream of one world government will likely fade, as it must. It will prove unattainable because the dominant social themes of the elite are not to be resuscitated. Yes, it is possible of course that some form of what is apparently planned will be implemented – but it will have been built faultily and based on force. Whatever it is, it won't last. It can't. It's too late.
Conclusion: There is a reason that the elite prizes the promotions that the Daily Bell regularly reports on. It is almost impossible to move billions of people in the direction you want to go without a concomitant belief structure. Communication revolutions (such as the one the Internet has ushered in) are deadly to elite organizational promotions. Ultimately, the desperate Western rush toward authoritarianism is proof positive of this looming failure. The dogs of war may bay. The sound cannot drown out hard-won knowledge.
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Posted by Magog on 04/10/10 06:47 AM
Has anybody, anytime asked the question why the jews have been hunted from country to country under 3000 years? Well folks - There's the answer.
Reply from The Daily Bell
Has anybody asked why the jews have been hunted from country to country when it is evident that the abuses of power in the world today emanate from a tiny handful of elite controllers, both jewish and non jewish. These individuals and families, in fact, seek to manipulate everyone else using fear-based promotions to consolidate wealth and influence. Religion in the traditional sense seems to have little to do with it.
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Posted by Anti Nazicon on 04/08/10 04:47 PM
Everything is f----- funny...
I bet GOD does not build the s---hole back up in 3 days ...
Reply from The Daily Bell
What God destroys He will not rebuild?
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Posted by Marc on 04/06/10 05:24 PM
"One cannot remove knowledge lodged in people's brains." I respectfully disagree. Americans are consumed with the sex life of golf pro's and celebrities, Survivor, celebrity dancing, and assorted death, murder and mayhem brought to them daily by mass media, instead of focusing on the greatest economic destruction in history, and the loss of demcoracy in the U.S., and the increased militarization within its boundaries.
When this knowledge becomes commonplace, it will be too late to do anything about it.THe baying of the dogs of war has always been mightier than any human words of wisdom, though a small minority may be paying attention.
History is rife with examples of societies that have died, along with all of their knowledge.I absolutely agree with the tone of your article. I too am an idealist. But bullets will stop ideas dead in their tracks. Unless and until someone picks up and runs with the knowledge, it is more likely that, after a few intellectuals are assassinated, the rest will keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves.
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Posted by EC on 04/06/10 01:19 PM
It's time for the US to quit babysitting Israel and all its wants and desires and aggressions towards other creeds and races. Other than the fact that local nuclear war could affect world climate, thus our ability to feed US and other nations' citizens, we shouldn't have a dog in this hunt. It's time for US blood to stop being shed for the country that brought us 9/11, whether by design or by neglect of strategic intelligence.
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Posted by Dave on 04/06/10 09:38 AM
I say that we destroy all illegal reactors being used to make actaul bombs,we can begin by attacking Dimona in Israel.Let's bury this dangerous myth once and for Click to view linkan never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map",translated from Farsi,Ahmedinejad said that the Zionist regime would collapse like other abusive regimes.You see,without the fake threat by Iran,the Israeli's have no case to destroy an electric generation plant that Iran has every right to build under the NPT which they are signatories to and Israel refuses to Click to view link is Israel that is a threat to the world and most especially to the US,our money,lives and liberty.
Reply from The Daily Bell
He was apparently mistranslated.
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Posted by Cathy Wilson on 04/06/10 06:25 AM
"..a war with Iran would probably involve an even more intensive police state in America..."
Such a development would be the end of America IMO. Americans already know that whatever provocation on the part of Iran most likely will be a manufactured event. People in large part bought into the government story of 9-11.
The next one will be much harder to sell if at all. People are already fed up with intrusive government, it would take very little in the way of provocation to see another Civil War/Revolution.
When America attacks Iran the wisest moves Americans could make would be to just say no to the almost certain drafting of your sons and daughters for their war effort. Americans involved in local law enforcement must also realize that they, not the Feds, will be the sharp edge of tyranny and as such can expect the most resistance.
Attacking Iran with or without provocation would be the single biggest mistake the NWO could commit in these interesting times.
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Posted by Mihail on 04/06/10 12:03 AM
IT'S JEWISH OFFICIAL,AMERICA HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN,FAKE JEWS,REVELATION 2:9,3:9.THOSE CRIMINAL KHAZARS ARE NOT ISRAEL OR JUDAH,THEY ADOPTED JUDAISM IN 740 BLACK SEE KINGDOM OF KHAZARIA.
Reply from The Daily Bell
DNA tests apparently show that Khazars are not apparently a large part of the Jewish population. Caps off, please.
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Posted by Lance E. Schultz on 04/05/10 02:37 PM
The bottom-line: Since the US party charters were authored they are both two branches of the same tree and neither reducing unemployment nor helping the economy are part of their purpose. They are both purposed with spreading the seeds of man's permanent enslavement to his debts.
With liberals on the one hand demanding a greater and greater personal interventionist welfare state and the conservatives on the other hand demanding a greater and greater foreign interventionist warfare state. Either branches root evokes the same tree.
A permanent codified mountain of irredeemable debt whose singular sadistic purpose was to permanently and irrevocably enslave and destroy the free individuals assembled in strong delusion under the protections of the United States Federal Government Corporation.
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Posted by Clay on 04/05/10 12:06 PM
We live in perilous times. The rapidity with which our statist powers are moving are truly hard to fathom. I for one being a christian have pondered our plight with a good degree of sobriety and find our current situation prophetic. I am not suggesting that we are on the verge of Apocalypse. (Although I don't doubt it either, that's another discussion which I will leave to Hal Lindsey to explain)
I am merely alluding to the inherent laws that God instilled into the conscience of mankind. It's sort of like gravity or the law of conservation of force, or any number of physical scientific laws. When you begin to lose the morality within society, the product of it's own environment eventually governs.
As that seed introduces it's ideology it takes the form of laws. If that law is devoid of integrity it will ultimately destabilize fairness horizontally across the societal plane. Since capitalism needs an unfettered environment in which to prosper and perpetuate these stumbling blocks introduced will eventually reward the inefficient and allow the strong to absorb their consequence and encourage money/resources to accumulate in untold other malinvestments.
All manner of avarice can be fulfilled when you have the power to exchange laws for self gain, which is why morality is such an important quality.(i.e pork barreling, bribery and lobbyists, campaign donations, stock options in companies etc.) These greed's always manifests as a burden to all and produce windfalls for such privy monopolies again rewarding the inefficient and penalizing legitimate competition.
Once the infestation starts it makes it hard for man to govern himself without some morale yardstick. Hence, "apart from me you can do nothing."-Jesus "Not even rule yourselves."-Me We as a nation need to overhaul our constitution, particularly the 17th amendment which will put the power of "removing" run way legislatures back into the hands of the people.
In this way "We the People" have direct power to institute immediate change.I for one think we should be able to hold "online" meetings where the people can take a vote on current pressing matters and resolve it in a matter of minutes. We should also address the matter of taxation once and for all.Any manner of taxation, wealth confiscation, or social programs needs to be agreed upon my a "super majority" of the voting public. 75 or more or those laws don't go into effect.
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Posted by Hajj Dawud on 04/05/10 05:48 AM
Yaawn More of the same, business as usual, threaten the next elections, swing The Lobby's club, send campaign contributions, stir up the voters on sham issues.Obama was elected to end the wars. But he was the darling of the media because he wouldn't do that. And his campaign promises that he honored followed the money.
Sure, Israelis would like to see America attack Iran. And Saudi Arabia. And the Sudan, with its oil-bearing southern regions under continuous siege on the false pretext that the 1 of the southern population that's "Christian" are suffering under some kind of oppression rather than being defended against by the rest of the Sudan.
And of course we must also invade Somalia, which is thriving outside Mogadishu without a central government like "the rest of the nations." Can't have tribal traditional government beating the pants off of central governments economically, and that's what Somalia has been doing for twenty years now.
So who goes into Somalia? The CIA-trained veterans of Afghanistan's expulsion of the Soviet occupation, or rather, their next generation, flying the Saudi flag of the Salafiyya - the most subtle and sophisticated colonialist movement to come out of the terminally-collapsed millennial muslim world to try to take over Muslim America (and fail).
Whoever can keep societies in turmoil, blooding themselves half to death (can't eliminate a labor pool, the price of labor would go up), gets the support.Military aid to the Afghani mujahideen for the expulsion of the Soviets was channeled to fierce warlord competitors who could be counted on to keep Afghanistan in civil wars for the foreseeable future.
The Taliban was the fly in that ointment, and still is. It's hard to eliminate a popular government party, and America can't do it any more than previous invaders of Afghanistan ~ like England ~ could do it.
Rattle the swords, herd the voters, see what pays off in November.But threaten the movement of petroleum through the Straits? Collapse the economies faster?Some people aren't stupid. Political theater is one thing ~ profits and international competition in the markets are quite Click to view linkan is not Iraq, debilitated by years of sanctions, or Afghanistan, an agrarian society for centuries with no interest in industrialization's bells and whistles, baubles and beads, or Palestine, with every infrastructure destroyed by Israeli bombing before it gets off the ground. Iran has some muscle, and American commanders know it.
So they'll resign, and less competent generals will take their places to prosecute a war the competent generals know can't be won. Just what America needs ~ another losing invasion of someone else's country.But there's that lingering question ... "Is it good for ..." (enter your favorite imperialist religion or Detroit auto-maker or weapons industry).
Reply from The Daily Bell
Thanks for the insights.
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Posted by Scott on 04/05/10 02:17 AM
"We have to contemplate the final option," said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., "the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon."Perhaps someone closer to the problem should take Chuck, Ben and Evan into the back room and explain the purpose and capability of the Trident fleet ballistic missile system. How many times do you idiots think you can get us to pay to solve the same problem? That war is over guys. You're out of work. Find something useful to do.
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Posted by Klaus Engelmann on 04/04/10 11:29 PM
The USA could use a strong dose of isolationism. A vacation, if you will, from the stresses of geopolitical skullduggery and confusion.
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Posted by Bill on 04/04/10 01:32 PM
Rest assured that the Industrial-Military Complex and its war machine partner the CIA have not convinced at least half the population of the merits of its wars.
However the TV still remains the primary way Americans get their news if they bother to do so. In 2003, the media campaign was so effective at intimidating our so-called elective representatives that the opposition wilted with Swiss like precision.
Communist China is the biggest creditor nation in the world. the Capitalistic USA is the largest debtor nation in the world-which one do you think people might chose?
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Posted by Alex Porter on 04/04/10 09:22 AM
In the last 2 weeks N.Korea has sunk a S. Korean submarine killing almost 50 men. When the world ignored the act it then threatened the US with a nuclear strike. You hear nothing in the media about it.
Why? Simple, the policy is paint Iran, Venezuela and others as the big enemy so to drum up support for an agressive strike. N. Korea's threats, if widely reported, would engender a lot of publicity and distract from the policy of demonising and attacking oil producing nations.
Israel certainly wants Americans to believe that Iran is the enemy and so the last thing they want is the attention shifted to the real threat which is N. Korea.
And the sabre-rattling fools baying for war never ask themselves why they have been lied to. Their ignorance can be depended upon by those who would exploit them. How foolish and what a shame! Now we know why there is a policy not to have the population too well educated. Too many of them may end up thinking.
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Posted by Bill Ross on 04/04/10 07:34 AM
"war ... that demon which has repeatedly brought down empires, is embraced by the Power Elite as a savior?"
Elites have no allegiance to empire, affiliations or organizations except as a means to personal ends. If they can profit at the expense of others by being pigs, excreting where they eat and sleep, they have and will. Our civilization no longer serves elite ends, so, it is expendable, a coin to be spent in their grasping and machinations.
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Posted by Bill Ross on 04/04/10 06:53 AM
"The sound cannot drown out hard-won knowledge."
That would be: There can be no "king of the hill", "rule of man" is an inherently unstable situation.
The choice is "rule of law" or anarchy and continued destruction of civilization (the rules by which we cooperate for MUTUAL self-interest).
http://www.cli.gs/RuleOfLaw
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Posted by Michael Ponzani on 04/04/10 01:21 AM
In the Yahoo! news article from 4-4-10 President Amenijhad says America is isolated. Our president has to sneak into a country where we have 60,000 troops.
He asks: Why is that? He said he went to Afghanistan with plenty of publicity and advance notice. He was welcomed with open arms. According to him we are isolated but we are too arrogant and full of hubris to realize this.
Our pres, like BushBozo before him snuck into our war countries under cover of darkness. If we were well liked everyone would roll out the red carpet. Rats and mice work under the cover of darkness. Paul says those who do evil will flee from the light when exposed, therefore be ye not of darkness but of light.
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Posted by ROBERT on 04/04/10 12:29 AM
So what if Iran gets nuclear weapons? Does anyone really beleive they would use them offensively when they know full well they will be totally destroyed by a swift retaliation from either Isreal or the USA or both? Rulers are always willing to sacrifice their own people in wars. BUT NEVER THEIR OWN LIVES. Suicide is not an option for the elite.
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Posted by MetaCynic on 04/03/10 09:42 PM
Gerald Celente of the prescient Trends Research Institute, has also predicted resumption of economic collapse in 2010 to be eventually accompanied by the distraction of war. Unfortunately war is always the last refuge of central planners fleeing their ruinous domestic plans.
Isn't it interesting that war, that most destructive and unpredictable of all demons, that demon which has repeatedly brought down empires, is embraced by the Power Elite as a savior?
The world is still reeling from the unforeseen repercussions of WW1. That war fractured four empires and unleashed unimaginable totalitarian horrors which roiled the 20th century, yet it was greeted with dancing in the streets throughout Europe's capitals!
The burdens of war and preparation for war have brought the American economy to the breaking point. Undeterred by the lessons of history, America's "best and brightest" are foolishly prepared to provoke another war which can sever oil lifelines to nuclear armed nations. That would be like a person deathly allergic to venom beating a wasps' nest with a stick.
Reply from The Daily Bell
So very eloquent. Thanks.
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Posted by SP on 04/03/10 06:42 PM
What right does the U.S. have to dictate who is allowed to have nuclear capabilities? Americans are the only ones who have used the bomb and they dropped two.
Military control is important, to the largest consumers of everything, including oil, in the Middle East region. The U.S. needs to control this supply of oil that is also desired by the other up and coming powers who's appetite is also insatiable when it comes to black gold.
Everyone acts naive and pretends that a Middle East Country can be a threat to the U.S. That is ridiculous, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are meant to go on and on. The U.S. has enough military might in the region to destroy Iran or all Middle East counties.The events that have be building, the rhetoric that has been building, the fact that the coalition governments are in striking position of Iran from Iraq, the Israeli badgering and arrogantly defying all reasonable peaceful solutions to their occupation of Palestine, point to a major conflict.
All of this is pointing to and imminent war with Iran.The heavy sanctions that the world is considering imposing on Iran is a reminder of the sanctions that provoked and gave Japan no way out on September 7, 1941.
The empire building continues as it has and will, the might of the U.S. technology and the willingness to sacrifice lives is unstoppable. Conscription is on the way and much higher taxes, I hate being the bearer of bad news but these facts are crystal clear, the world is going to look different in the next ten years. Lots of people will die.
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