This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
The Donald Trump time machine fuelled by hatred, violence and lies is carrying humanity back to the dark ages with terrifying speed.
After Venezuelan seamen clinging to their capsized boat in the Caribbean are deemed a threat and killed by a US air strike, and two protesters in Minneapolis are shot to death by federal immigration agents acting as a government-sanctioned lynch mob, over a hundred schoolgirls in Iran are slaughtered by a Tomahawk missile in their classrooms.
In the 1930s, the savagery of European fascist regimes shocked contemporaries, who discovered to their horror that human capacity for evil had in no way diminished during centuries of material and educational progress.
“Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a wasteland and call it peace – were the bitter words of a British chieftain called Calgacus 2,000 years ago, as reported by Roman historian Tacitus, denouncing the destruction of his country and its people by the Roman legions. His condemnation of imperial brutality and hypocrisy has reverberated down the centuries, and, were Calgacus alive today, he would find much horribly familiar in the American and Israeli air war on Iran, their targets including bridges, universities, hospitals and pharmaceutical plants.
In Lebanon, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) blow up whole villages and have driven 1.2 million Lebanese from their homes. Within a few minutes on Wednesday, Israeli air strikes across Lebanon killed 303 people and injured 1,165, according to health officials .
“Back to the Stone Age,” whooped the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, with loathsome relish in a post last week, repeating Trump’s own threat to demolish all civilian infrastructure in Iran. No lie was too ridiculous not to be pressed into service to justify the communal punishment of 92 million Iranians, with White House spokesperson Anna Kelly claiming: “The Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing.”
The balance of power in the Middle East – and to a degree the world – is in flux. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have failed to achieve their goals. The Iranian regime has survived a five-and-half week war which has, paradoxically, devastated it materially and strengthened it strategically. Its control of the Strait of Hormuz and continued ability to fire missiles and drones across the Gulf at key installations in the Arab oil states – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Oman – have made it the dominant power in the Gulf. Trump’s inability to subdue Iran is given greater global significance by his grandiloquent boasts of complete victory over a prostrate Iranian enemy begging for a ceasefire.
The priorities of the three players in the wars in Iran and Lebanon – the US, Iran and Israel – will become clearer in the US-Iran peace talks in Islamabad this weekend, if they take place. But their relationship with each other and their allies is often misunderstood. Israel has escalated its war in Lebanon, possibly in order to sabotage the shaky US-Iran ceasefire and to force Iran to abandon Hezbollah or stall the talks.
It is not an easy choice for Iran: Hezbollah is frequently referred to as “an Iranian proxy”, one of a depleted string of such movements in Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Yet the fundamental fact about them all is not Iranian backing, but their common Shia Muslim faith. Hezbollah is drawn from the 1.5 million strong Shia community in Lebanon, which gives it resilience despite devastating casualties. Israel’s war against Hezbollah is against the Lebanese Shia as a whole, the IDF adopting similar tactics of mass destruction and depopulation as were used against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Iran will find it difficult to abandon Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia in sole pursuit of Iranian interests. Moreover, the new Iranian leadership – which Trump absurdly claims is more tractable than its assassinated predecessors – is evidently in a confident mood, newly aware of their ability to wreck the world economy.
Trump evidently wants out of a stalemated military conflict, mis-sold to him by Netanyahu and Washington hawks as cheap and easy. They still claim that escalation will produce this promised victory. But the President probably understands that a limited ground invasion using the 50,000 US troops in the region might not be a gamechanger, while a YouGov/Economist opinion poll shows that 53 per cent of Americans oppose the Iran war and just 15 per cent support the use of ground troops.
The next few days may show if the close military and political alliance between Israel and the US is fracturing under the strain of pursuing different objectives. Will Trump simply order Netanyahu to extend the ceasefire to Lebanon in order to save the ceasefire with Iran? He has the power to do so, since Israel would not have had the strength to succeed to the degree it has in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran without the US acting, either covertly or overtly, as co-belligerent. Allied to Israel though the US has been for three quarters of a century, the relationship became far closer in the last five years. Previously, Washington had backed but also restrained Israel in its military actions, never fully accepting that American and Israeli interests were identical.
But a crucial decision was taken in the last days of the first Trump administration in 2021, when it was announced that in future Israel would co-ordinate its military operations with the US Central Command, or Centcom, instead of the US military command in Europe.
“Once Israel was integrated into Centcom,” says Jon B Alterman, an expert in global security at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington writing in The New York Times, “US and Israeli officers responsible for the Middle East planned together and trained together and they learned to operate together”.
Former Centcom chief General Michael Erik Kurilla reportedly visited Israel 40 times. When the war against Iran started on 28 February, Alterman writes that the Israeli and US military co-operated more closely “than any other American partner has since the British in World War II”.
It was a joint war, but it is unlikely to be a joint peace. Netanyahu says that for 40 years he had been trying to get the US on board in a war with Iran, Israel’s only real rival for Middle East dominance. He finally got his war, but it has failed to eliminate Iran as a Middle East player – indeed Tehran now has more powerful cards in its hand than ever before.
The partners are finding they have different goals: Israel is prepared to fight a forever war to establish an unstable hegemony in the Middle East. This can only be accomplished, if it can be done at all, in lockstep with the US, an alliance which greatly enhances Israel’s power, but makes it even more dependent on Washington.
Neither the US nor Israel have got what they wanted from the Iran war, but the US is paying the heaviest price. Speculation is already rife that the US has suffered its own “Suez moment”, recalling the British attack, in secret alliance with Israel, on Egypt in 1956 which produced a military success for the UK but a political catastrophe. It is a comparison that looks, from the American point of view, all too apt.
Further thoughts
When I try to enter the feelings of Iranians under bombardment night after night by the US and Israel, I go back to what my parents – Claud and Patricia Cockburn – experienced during the Blitz in London in 1940-41 and again during the V1 and V2 attacks in 1944 (when their house in St John’s Wood was destroyed by a direct hit by a V1).
My mother thought she was safe as she was working for Air Raid Precautions (ARP) in a deep bunker in Paddington, dispatching fire brigades, ambulances and heavy rescue vehicles as air raid wardens reported the bomb damage. It was testing as the dispatchers were on 24-hour shifts, because the authorities feared a poison gas attack might prevent them getting to the bunker. To fend off boredom when nothing was happening they obsessively played table tennis.
When she was not on duty, she found the raids frightening at the time but not demoralising in the longer term because, “once the raid was over, it was uplifting to have survived – and the dead did not really have a vote”. I felt much the same when under shellfire during the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.
Both my mother and my father were out when their house was hit by a V1 in 1944. As a child, I was much impressed by the strength of the explosion. I felt I knew a bit about it because in the centre of our drawing room in our house in Ireland was a very pretty round mosaic table, inlaid with flowers and leaves made from green, yellow and red stones. But across the centre of the table, the mosaic was disfigured by a long scar where the coloured stones had been ripped out by the blast. I would run my fingers down the groove and wonder what had happened to the lost stones.
As with many caught up in the disasters of war, Patricia, who was living in Cumberland at the time of the explosion, had little time to be shocked because she was fully absorbed in the practicalities of survival. Decades later I found a brief unpunctuated telegram she had written to her mother, who was in London, on hearing of the V1 strike: “Hope you are alright my house destroyed could you contact Claud’s secretary Mrs Risner Chancery 6565 about saving remains of furniture will try to ring you tonight my number Brampton 137 love Patricia.”
I find the lack of emotion makes it all the more evocative.
Beneath the Radar
Few assassinations achieve the aims of the assassins. Of course, there are exceptions: Abraham Lincoln in Washington in 1865 and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv in 1995, for instance. Otherwise, assassinations often fail to make an impact because the victims were not as effective for good or evil as the assassins supposed.
Leadership cadres are often of such indifferent or low quality that their elimination is not a game-changer. It is a cynical and unsavoury speculation, but suppose the entire front rank of British political and military leaders were hypothetically blown up tomorrow, would their loss significantly degrade British power?
It is no surprise that the assassination of Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and numerous other Iranian leaders did not do too much damage to the Iranian state machine. On the contrary, Khamenei’s political and military strategies had already foundered, discredited by developments over the last six or seven years.
Famed for his fatwa of 2003 against Iran building a nuclear bomb, Khamenei presided over a leadership that had a nuclear strategy – uranium enrichment but no nuclear device – that made it a potential threat but gave it no practical deterrent. It was easy for Netanyahu and Trump to justify their war by saying that Iran was about to have a nuclear device – untrue according to US intelligence, but a bit of threat-inflation that frightened everybody. Iran got the worst of all possible worlds.
Since 2020 – when General Qassem Soleimani, who headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ operations in the Middle East, was assassinated on Trump’s order – Tehran has responded timidly to US and Israeli attacks and assassinations. It would fire a few symbolic missiles at Israel or US bases, their arrival telegraphed well ahead, to avoid casualties. This gave adversaries an impression of weakness rather than moderation.
The idea was to avoid giving Israel and the US an excuse to attack Iran itself. This is not to say that a more robust response would have deterred the US and Israel, but Khamenei’s cautious policies – better geared to an earlier era in US politics under president Barack Obama – demonstrably failed.
Cockburn’s picks
There is an impressive piece in The New York Times titled “How Trump took the US to war against Iran” by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman which details the key meetings at which the decision to go to war was taken.
According to their report, the most important of these was on 11 February where Netanyahu addressed Trump and his chief lieutenants, describing the fragility of the Iranian regime and how swiftly it would collapse without the ability to conduct counter-measures – like closing the Strait of Hormuz. Unfortunately, the long article is behind a paywall, but here is an excerpt from the Israeli leader’s successful sales pitch for war:
“Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile programme could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests in neighbouring countries was assessed as minimal.
“Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and – with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion – an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.”
Hence then, the article about trump s hate filled time machine is carrying humanity back to the dark ages was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump’s hate-filled time machine is carrying humanity back to the dark ages )
Also on site :