casey worthington

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@joekent16jan19 Iran’s total military budget is about 1% of the USA’s. We can’t win a war against them… imagine an actual threat from China! We have been completely exposed. America’s Suez moment.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@BrettErickson28 WAY more than 2 Americans have died in this latest round of violence. They have been lying the entire time… “intercepting every missile” yet tons of damage being done somehow.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@AIPAC 🖕

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@TheIranianzg3z Now imagine the US in an actual hot war with China over e.g. Taiwan. The paper tiger has been completely and finally exposed.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@DanielLMcAdams Decoys to protect our masters in 🇮🇱.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@clashreport Oh good Israel is investigating itself? It’s like having the Nazis run the Nuremberg trials.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@tparsi UK and France are infinitely more powerful and important than Israel in a world where the US sheds its leech.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@ericweinstein @JDVance What do you love about Israel?

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@tparsi Watch out for an Israeli false flag. Israeli politicians are talking openly about finding “creative” ways to restart the war.

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@OunkaOnX Haha and 🇮🇷 are the religious extremists

[casey worthington @casedwort]

@DropSiteNews 🤣

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Nothing to see here, just Israel live streaming its war crimes.

[Zo Brown @receipts_lol]

Also important to understand that Ben-Gvir posts torture videos like that all the time, with Palestinian prisoners.

And the world has been silent until now, when Europeans appeared in the videos instead of Palestinians.

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

They will celebrate ethnic cleansing and then tell you with a straight face Ben Gvir does not represent who they are as a nation.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This is genuinely insane.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes about Tucker Carlson's appearance on Israel's Channel 13. Worth reading the whole thing. Here are the first two paragraphs:

[Daniel McAdams @DanielLMcAdams]

What is the silver lining in today's devastating defeat of American hero Thomas Massie in his primary against a 100 percent AIPAC funded astroturf candidate?
We are all depressed, those of us who love our country.
But the silver lining is that all of America - especially younger America which is the future - understands that we are Israeli occupied territory, as our idol Patrick Buchanan warned us more than 30 years ago.
Congress sends that shitty little country billions and they spend millions hiring all the Beltway prostitutes to do their bidding in think tanks and PR firms and and in media and in the Pentagon and in the military industrial complex.
The parasites. Robbing us to propagandize us.
Their goal is to purchase 535 US Representatives. And they have succeeded.
Until now.
Bankruptcy is slow slow slow and then all of a sudden. As was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and communism.
The same is true about the realization that we are under the control of a foreign power. Like Eastern Europe under the Soviet yoke.
@RepThomasMassie's loss is a win.
Real America wakes up to understand that we are no longer America. We are slaves to a foreign master whose parasitic fangs originate inTel Aviv but extend into the heart of the "patriotic" movements in the United States. Who are all paid with the tax money stolen from us to underwrite the parasitic power.
It is the most corrupt arrangement in history. And the young people in the US understand it well.
Radicalize yourselves against occupation, young America!

[Daniel McAdams @DanielLMcAdams]

This is what a holocaust looks like.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.

As a reminder Bob Kagan is:

- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)

- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...

- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today)

- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge

In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.

And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).

So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.

Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (https://t.co/tbnOpdYqux).

Here they are 👇

1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't

He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions.

Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.”

And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”

Same point.

2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage

When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”

He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words.

3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran

He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power.

Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”

On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…

4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz

Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.”

On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”

The exact same argument.

5) Global chain reaction

Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”

6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered

Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”

Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”

Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”

Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”

-----------
So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢

Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.

First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map.

For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.

Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.

I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is.

Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!

He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”

The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:

"There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead."

I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke.

Src for the Atlantic article: https://t.co/ItED9WS9Kn

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

The US and Israel committed so many war crimes in Iran, it's easy for outsiders to lose track

As the first American (or one of the first) to report from the B1 Bridge, Wyatt reminds us of an especially diabolical terror attack by the US regime