Last Tango in Warsaw

Last Tango in Warsaw

By Eric S. Margolis

February 16, 2019

Warsaw, Poland is not a fun place to visit in darkest February, but that is where the US just staged an anti-Iranian jamboree of 60 client states that brought derision and scorn from Europeans and much of the Mideast.

The point of this cynical exercise was to lay the diplomatic groundwork for an anti-Iranian coalition to act as a fig-leaf for an upcoming attack on Iran planned by President Donald Trump and his close ally, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
The real question is who is calling the shots in bleak Warsaw, Trump or Bibi Netanyahu?  It seems to many that the Israeli tail is again wagging the American dog.
This is thanks to the power of America’s born-again evangelicals, hoodwinked into believing that a Greater Israel is somehow a key part of the Second Coming of Christ.
A Fox News poll this week finds that a quarter of these credulous folks believe that God actually summoned Donald Trump to become president.  This may even be more than the number of Americans who believe that Elvis is still alive.  More proof that the Republicans have pretty much become a theological party.
The three horseman of the hard right Republican Apocalypse, Vice president Mike Pence, Insecurity advisor John Bolton, and State Secretary Mike Pompeo (who reportedly keeps an open bible on his desk) joined their voices to the Warsaw jamboree to excoriate Iran for being a ‘sponsor of terrorism,’ and a danger to world peace and stability.
The never understated Bibi Netanyahu, whose nation has at least 100 nuclear weapons, claimed Iran, which has no nukes and feeble armed forces, was planning a ‘second Holocaust’ for Israel.
An over-excited Netanyahu even tweeted that the Warsaw meeting was preparing for `war with Iran.’  He was forced to retract his tweet.  But he did get to sit next to the delegate from war-torn Yemen, a stooge put into place by the Saudis and Emiratis whose aggression against Yemen has so far cost hundreds of thousands of lives, mass starvation and epidemics.
This week a newly energized US House of Representatives voted for an end to their nation’s support for the Saudi-led war in the Mideast’s poorest nation.  The Senate, still controlled by Republican Crusaders, will be likely to vote down the sensible House proposal.
Another participant at Warsaw was the largest Arab nation, Egypt.  This nation just extended the rule of its military dictator, Field Marshall al-Sisi, to 2034.  It was Sisi, backed by Saudi money, who overthrew Egypt’s first democratic government in history, killing and jailing thousands.
In a slap in the face to Washington, Europe’s leaders, France, Germany and the European Union government, either refused to attend the Warsaw hate-fest against Iran or sent low-level paper-passers.
Ironically, while Trump’s people were fulminating against Iranian ‘terrorism,’ it was Iran that was the victim of terrorist attacks.  An attack from a Pakistan-based Sunni Jaish al-Adl extremist group linked to the CIA killed 27 soldiers and wounded a similar number.  Iran has been the target of constant attacks since its 1979 revolution by groups linked to the US, and from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other US regional vassals.
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is even a long-term lobbyist for the hyper-violent Marxist Iranian extremist group, the MEK which was even branded a ‘terrorist group’ by the US government.
The Warsaw jamboree was also supposed to set the stage for Trump’s much ballyhooed Mideast ‘peace’ plan.  Run by son-in-law Jared Kushner, the full plan is expected to be released in April, right after Israeli elections.  It will likely consist of trying to buy off Palestinian land claims with US taxpayer money and some cash from the Saudis. America’s Arab client states in the region will all provide polite applause.
The Warsaw jamboree produced no evident results and left the US even more isolated than before.  Europe is moving ahead with a financial mechanism to permit trade with Iran that circumvents US sanctions.  US intelligence itself reports that Iran is not working in nuclear weapons.  Europe wants to trade with Iran.
America’s anti-Iran campaign has just suffered another blow.  This after Washington badly damaged relations with China and Canada over the arrest of the daughter in Vancouver of the founder of Huawei over charges it traded with Iran.  Most non-Americans view this as an outrage.  But the later-day Crusaders around Trump don’t seem to care that they are damaging America’s reputation and making a mess of its foreign policy.

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