As the tragedy in Afghanistan continues, there is at least one positive consequence. The warmongers in Israel and their allies in the neoconservative Washington, D.C. war party will find it even harder to convince the American public to support an invasion and “regime change” in Iran.
The idea was already absurd and dangerous. But now the Afghanistan debacle should bury it permanently. Despite 20 years and $1 trillion in military and other aid, the U.S. supported-government collapsed within weeks.
Iran’s population is 83 million, more than twice Afghanistan’s 38 million. It is economically advanced, with a large, educated, technically skilled middle class. What’s more, as John Ghazvinian’s magisterial new history of U.S.-Iran relations points out,
. . . Iran is one of the world’s oldest, proudest, and most enduring civilizations. . . Iran has had three thousand years of (mostly) continuous nationhood. . . It is also one of only seven or eight nations that were never colonized by European powers. . .
The regime-changers do not understand a simple human truth; people anywhere will fight to resist foreign invaders, even if they dislike their own government, especially when the outsiders have a different religion and culture.
Even more preposterous is the Iranian exile group the regime changers are allied with to topple the government in Teheran. The People’s Mujahadeen of Iran (MEK) is a cult organization, based in Albania with no real presence inside Iran, other than small groups of commandos who are probably responsible for sabotage and assassinations. The MEK does have funds — the rumors are that Saudi Arabia contributes — which it has used to lure people like Rudy Giuliani and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton into speaking at its conferences. Bolton told a 2017 MEK gathering in Paris, “There is a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs, and that opposition is centered in this room today.”
But the most astonishing fact about the MEK is that it fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War against its own countrymen. The MEK itself estimated that it killed over 50,000 Iranian troops. It defies human nature to believe that such an organization will ever be accepted by the Iranian people.
The Iran regime changers are already howling in fear at the sudden collapse in Afghanistan. Here’s one hysterical neoconservative apparatchik, Eli Lake:
After surrendering to the Taliban, does the Biden administration really have the stomach for its long sought capitulation to Iran?
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Israel’s front organization, is a little more circumspect. But FDD director Mark Dubowitz did warn darkly: “The team managing America’s disastrous Afghanistan policy is in charge of managing America’s disastrous Iran policy.”
Meanwhile, the humanitarian Afghanistan crisis continues. Amid all the noise in the U.S., Rep. Ilhan Omar, a former refugee herself, had one of the most sensible responses:
There will be plenty of time for confronting the failures of Afghanistan policy over the course of 4 presidencies. The urgency of the moment now demands we marshal an international coalition to evacuate every Afghan citizen who is fleeing for their lives.
There will be lots more of this. The neocons and rw zionists want blood. Lots of blood. Despicable ppl in every respect.
America never learns from past mistakes. America has made blunder after blunder attacking other nations leaving behind a trail of utter destruction, chaos, and innocent civilians killed, injured, and refugees. What is happening in Afghanistan was predicted by the anti war crowd, and they were right. You have to wonder why Bush, Cheney, and the war hawks, were so naive as to not predict this ending. I guess they were too full of themselves, too arrogant but stupid to think we were unbeatable.
It is embarrassing to think that a band of stone age militants got the better of us.
This should remind Americans, that another war, this time with Iran, will backfire too.
Iran is not Iraq, and they will fight back fiercely and strongly for sure. The Israeli leadership is going to be disappointed, but chances of the US attacking Iran are slim to none right now.
Bibi’s grandstanding with cartoon bombs, and rows of files, were in vain. It was however a good clown show.
The concept that the Taliban could not be defeated because the opposing force was foreign grown is decidedly unproven. What may be proven is that an artificial force cannot defeat a real force. One might hope that democracy could prevail to assert the will to power to defeat a bunch of backward imams like the Taliban. one would hope futilely. Force rules in the world and the Taliban has sufficient force and ideology to defeat a corrupt government’s artificial army. This has nothing to do with various tactics used by the US losing the support of the hearts and minds of the people. This has to do with guns and ideas: an ideological force that has an organizing principle and the will to power defeated an artificial army.
Similarly the imams that control Iran have a will to power. Sufficient but certainly not majority support of the people plus the will to power adds up to victory. For the US to press for regime change might have moral validity. This is for the most part irrelevant. The will to power is relevant and the opposition to the imams does not have sufficient power to kick out those backward imams.