Washington Sets Trap for Iran, Will Iran Take the Bait?

September 24, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific, Washington is moving toward an equally dangerous, regional war in the Middle East between its Israeli proxies and a growing list of neighboring states and organizations.
This includes Lebanon and the Lebanese-based military and political organization Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Republic, Iran, as well as Shi’a militias across Iraq and Yemeni-based Ansar Allah referred to across the Western media as the “Houthis.”

This large group of nations and organizations stretching across the region share a common denominator – they all serve as obstacles to US primacy over the region, with the US itself having waged war directly and/or indirectly against each since the end of World War2.

Just as the US has recruited Ukraine to wage war on Russia by proxy in Eastern Europe and has politically captured and used the island province of Taiwan against the rest of China in the Asia-Pacific region, the US has carefully cultivated Israel politically and militarily for decades to serve as a proxy used to carry out assassinations, terrorist attacks, military strikes, and even provoke wars the US itself seeks plausible deniability in regard to.

Toward this end, the US provides Israel with billions in aid annually, including a steady flow of arms and ammunition Israel’s various wars of aggression would be impossible to conduct without. While Washington publicly poses as seeking peace and stability in the Middle East, its continuous support for Israel enables the perpetual conflict and instability undermining the region.

Most recently, the US has repeatedly claimed to have urged Israeli restraint regarding its military operations against Gaza. In practice, however, the US has enabled the large-scale destruction of Gaza through the continual shipment of munitions including thousands of bombs used in Israeli airstrikes, Reuters reported in June of this year.

Despite both the US and its Israeli proxies claiming Israeli actions are done in self-defense, the level of violence has been one-sided, with Gaza all but flattened and tens of thousands left dead, injured, or displaced. In parallel with its operations in Gaza, Israel has carried out strikes against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran – none of whom were involved in Hamas attacks in October last year, according to the Israeli military itself.

All three nations have repeatedly resisted retaliating to these Israeli provocations.

Israel: The Original Ukraine-Style Battering Ram

The nature of Israeli belligerence is transparent, part of a well-documented US policy to provoke wider war across the Middle East the US can then justify intervening in – and war both the US and its Israeli proxies can cite when using weapons and tactics otherwise difficult or impossible to justify – up to and including nuclear weapons.

In 2009, the Brookings Institution in its 170-page paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran,” would detail various means to coerce, contain, and ultimately overthrow the government of Iran, including waging war against Iran.

The paper admits how difficult it would be for the United States itself to launch military strikes against Iran, stating:

…any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it.

It also says:

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it.

An entire chapter was dedicated to the use of Israel to carry out an initial strike on Iran, allowing the US to distance itself from culpability. Titled, “Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” it explicitly states:

…the goal of this policy option would be to destroy key Iranian nuclear facilities in the hope that doing so would significantly delay Iran’s acquisition of an indigenous nuclear weapons capability. However, in this case, an added element could be that the United States would encourage—and perhaps even assist—the Israelis in conducting the strikes themselves, in the expectation that both international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel.

The paper notes that an Israeli strike could, “trigger a wider conflict between Israel and Iran that could draw in the United States and other countries,” giving Washington the pretext it seeks ahead of any war of aggression it itself wages against Iran.

With this policy in mind, Israel’s steady cadence of increasingly provocative attacks against Iran and its allies is easier to understand. The US, through Israeli provocations, seeks to provoke a wider war the US itself can wade into, appearing to be aiding an ally rather than initiating yet another war of aggression in the Middle East.

Ultimately, for this trap to work successfully, Iran must retaliate to one of these many provocations, and do so in a way the US and its allies can portray as disproportionate or even “unprovoked.”

So far, Iran’s responses have been exceedingly measured.

Latest Lebanon Pager Terrorist Attack Predictable, Preventable

September 20, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Western media is calling an indiscriminate Israeli terrorist attack across Lebanon that has killed several, including at least one child and injured thousands, “unprecedented” and “sophisticated”. Yet nothing about the attack, which reportedly involved 5,000 pagers rigged with remotely detonated explosives before distribution, was unpredictable or unpreventable.

Reuters in its article, “Israel planted explosives in 5,000 Hezbollah’s pagers, say sources,” would report:

The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.

The Lebanese security source said the pagers were from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, but the company said it did not manufacture the devices, but were made by a European firm with the right to use its brand.

Reuters reported that up to 3 grams of explosives were hidden inside a batch of new pagers, exploding when “a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.”

Reuters reports that the pagers originated from a Taiwan-based manufacturer, who in turn claims the devices were assembled in Europe with their permission to use their brand.

The pagers purchased by and for distribution to Hezbollah’s security, administrative, medical, relief, and adjacent networks spent the entirety of their time from manufacturing to shipment in potential enemy hands before arriving in Lebanon, exposing them to at a minimum well-documented security breaches the US and its proxies have implemented for well over a decade.

This time, the devices were transformed into remotely detonated explosives with enough energy to seriously maim or kill those holding the devices or maim and kill those located nearby.

The attack was made possible not by a lapse in security or because the threat was until now inconceivable, but only by a complete lack of relevant national and operational security policy and procedures involving the procurement of technology for official and/or domestic use versus the well-understood dangers of sourcing technology from abroad.

A Long, Documented History of Turning Tech into Ticking Time bombs

American citizen and former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden was among the first to suspect the pager attack was not the result of an Israeli “hack” compromising the batteries of the devices, but was instead the result of the devices being tampered with to include explosives either at the factory or at a shipping facility. In a September 18, 2024 post on social media network X, Snowden included photos from 2013 of NSA teams opening packages and tampering with IT devices during transit.

Snowden would comment:

I keep thinking about this Top Secret photo from the revelations of mass surveillance back in 2013, revealing how the NSA poisoned commercial shipments in transit (often at airports) to spy on the ultimate recipients. Ten years later, and shipment security never improved.

In a 2015 article, this author warned about the national security implications of depending on other nations for information technology. The article cited Popular Science mentioning a process called “interdiction,” which it describes as a process, “in which they intercept mailed goods and replace them with infected versions.”

Also cited was a 2013 Australian Financial Review article titled, “Intel chips could let US spies inside: expert,” describing a multitude of cybersecurity breaches and the likelihood that the US NSA was likely “embedding back doors inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.”

US War on China is a War on the Entire World

September 7, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has recently claimed the US is not “looking for a crisis.” This is said, of course, with an important caveat – no crisis is sought as long as China subordinates itself to the United States. 

Because China, like any other sovereign nation, based on international law, is obligated to resist foreign subordination, the US continues speeding toward inevitable war with China. Although China has formidable military capabilities, causing doubt among many that the US will actually ever trigger war with China, the US has spent decades attempting to create and exploit a potential weakness China’s current military might may be incapable of defending against.

Washington’s Long-Running Policy of Containing China 

Far from a recent policy shift by the Biden Administration, US ambitions to encircle and contain China stretch back to the end of World War 2. Even as far back as 1965 as the US waged war against Vietnam, US documents referred to a policy “to contain Communist China,” as “long-running,” and identified the fighting in Southeast Asia as necessary toward achieving this policy.

For decades the US has waged wars of aggression along China’s periphery, engaged in political interference to destabilize China’s partners as well as attempt to destabilize China itself, as well as pursued likewise long-running policies to undermine China’s economic growth and its trade with the rest of the world.

More recently, the US has begun reorganizing its entire military for inevitable war with China.

Cutting Chinese Economic Lines of Communication  

In addition to fighting Chinese forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the US also has long-running plans to cut off Chinese trade around the globe.

In 2006, the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) published “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asia Littoral,” identifying China’s essential “sea lines of communication” (SLOC) from the Middle East to the Strait of Malacca as particularly vulnerable and subject to US primacy over Asia.

The paper argues that US primacy, and in particular, its military presence across the region, could be used as leverage for “drawing China into the community of nations as a responsible stakeholder,” a euphemism for subordinating China to US primacy. This, in turn, is in line with a wider global policy seeking to “deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.” 

Under a section titled, “Leveraging U.S. Military Power,” the paper argues for and expanded US military presence across the entire region, including along China’s SLOC, augmenting its existing presence in East Asia (South Korea and Japan), but also extending it to Southeast Asia and South Asia, recruiting nations like Indonesia and Bangladesh to bolster US military power over the region and thus over China.

It notes Chinese efforts to secure its SLOC, including with a mutually beneficial port project in Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, part of the larger China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the construction of a port in Sittwe, Myanmar, part of the larger China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Both projects seek to create alternative economic lines of communication for China, circumventing the long and vulnerable sea route through the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

US Seeks “Super Weapons” to Reign as Sole Superpower

September 3, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US openly declares that it seeks to maintain a monopoly over shaping the “international order” following the Cold War and America’s emergence from it as the sole superpower. 

This policy is not new.

The New York Times in a 1992 article titled, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” would note that the Pentagon sought to create a world, “dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.” 

This policy set the stage for decades of US wars of aggression, political interference, regime change, US-sponsored terrorism, economic sanctions, and a growing confrontation directly between the US and a reemerging Russia as well as a rising China, all of which continue playing out to this day.

Emerging from the Cold War as the sole “superpower,” the US carefully cultivated public perception through likewise carefully chosen conflicts showcasing its military supremacy. While the US still to this day cites its wars with Iraq in 1990 and 2003 along with the toppling of the Libyan government in 2011 as proof of its uncontested military power, in truth, both targeted nations were not nearly as powerful or as dangerous as the Western media claimed at the time.

This facade has crumbled since. “American primacy” is now not only facing serious challenges, the premise it is based on – the notion that a single nation representing a fraction of the global population can or even should hold primacy over the rest of the planet – has been revealed as wholly unsustainable, if not self-destructive.

Not only is US military and economic power visibly waning, the military and economic power of China, Russia, and a growing number of other nations is rapidly growing.

The special interests within the US pursuing global primacy, do so in perpetual pursuit of wealth and power, often at the expense of many of the purposes a modern, functional nation-state exists to fulfill. Often this process includes the deliberate plundering of the key pillars of a modern nation-state’s power –  industry, education, culture, and social harmony. This, in turn, only accelerates the collapse of US economic and military power.

Ukraine Lays Bare American Weakness 

Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has laid bare for the world to see this fundamental weakness. US weapons have proven less-than-capable against a peer adversary, Russia.

America’s expensive precision-guided artillery shells, rockets, and missiles were built in smaller numbers than their conventional counterparts, supposedly because they could achieve with just one round what several conventional rounds could. A single US-made 155 mm GPS-guided Excalibur artillery shell, for example, is claimed by Raytheon to achieve what would otherwise require 10 conventional artillery shells.

This myth of quality over quantity has unraveled on and over the battlefield in Ukraine. Russia is not only capable of producing vastly more conventional weapons than the US and its European proxies, it is able to produce vastly more high-tech precision-guided weapons as well, including its own precision-guided artillery shells (the laser-guided Krasnopol), precision-guided multiple launch artillery systems (the Tornado-S), as well as larger quantities of ballistic and cruise missiles (Iskander, Kalibr, and Kh-101).

In other areas, Russia possesses capabilities the US does not have. Russia fields two types of hypersonic missiles, the Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile and the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile. Russia also possesses air and missile defense as well as electronic warfare capabilities the US cannot match – not in quality, not in quantity.

How is the US Convincing the Philippines to Destroy Itself?

August 29, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - As China rises, Asia rises with it. The Southeast Asian state of the Philippines stood to rise alongside the rest of the region until relatively recently as the United States successfully convinces the Philippines to do otherwise. 

Before the current administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office, China was working with the Philippines to build badly needed modern infrastructure. Now, rather than working and trading together with China, the Philippines is pointing missiles at China. It has “invited” the United States, the Philippines’ former colonial master, to build new military facilities across its territory, using semantics and legal loopholes to sidestep the Philippines own constitution and undermine its sovereignty in the process.

Instead of rising with the rest of Asia, the Philippines continues to escalate toward a conflict that could set the entire region back decades or more.

Just as the United States politically captured Ukraine in Eastern Europe in 2014 and transformed it into a geopolitical battering ram against neighboring Russia at the expense of Ukraine’s population, economy, sovereignty, and possibly even its existence, it is repeating the same process with the Philippines vis-à-vis China.

How has the United States convinced a nation of over 115 million people to forego economic progress and development in exchange for an escalating confrontation with its own largest trade partner? What are the mechanisms Washington uses to convince an entire nation to race toward conflict and self-destruction?

A Vast Network of Propaganda 

There is growing awareness of the means by which the US interferes politically in targeted nations through the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and adjacent organizations, agencies, and foundations, compromising a nation’s leadership and reshaping national policies to serve Washington at the expense of the targeted nation.

The NED does this through targeting every aspect of a nation-state, from its political system, to academia, from its courts and legal system to a nation’s information space.

Philippine information space, like many nations around the globe, has been targeted by a vast media network built up by the US government as well as corporate money funneled through intermediaries including foundations and endowments, to poison the Philippine people not only against China specifically, but against the Philippines’ own best interests in general.

Part of this vast network are so-called “fact-checking” projects the US government together with the largest names in Western media as well as US-based tech giants like Google uses to paradoxically reinforce US government disinformation and attack and undermine people and organizations working to inform the public – including the Philippine public – of what the US is really doing and why.

In the Philippines, this network includes PressOne. Its “fact-checking” activities have repeatedly targeted those exposing US interference in the Philippines’ internal political affairs and undermining Philippine sovereignty.