World in Crisis

Dear Leader seems to be looking for an excuse to start a war.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, [Fuckface] said he's "hearing little stories about Iran"—apparently referring to U.S. intelligence officials' unsubstantiated claim that Iran was behind [reported attacks on Saudi and UAE oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend]. Iran has denied any involvement.

Thomas Klikauer says the right wins power by telling people they are being attacked. Klikauer argues that the global rise of right wing politics is due to "capitalism’s global effort to take our attention away from the impending environmental annihilation caused by capitalism".

That we see the global rise of nationalistic populism right now is a sure sign of the seriousness of what capital has understood is coming. The inevitable conclusion is nationalistic populism will continue to grow. And it will increase in ferocity. It may even end in a similar way to the first wave, outright Fascism. Given the recent history of capitalism, one should never totally discount such a possibility. This is not to argue that 2019 is 1933. It is not. What is coming will be worse. The looming fight will be worse and even if we win, the outcome will be horrendous.

Update (May 19):  Citing the work of Crawford Brough Macpherson, Ian McKay contends that liberal democracy, "a contradiction in terms", is in crisis around the world. Classic liberals were concerned with individual rights, but "[t]he key was property. Society was little more than an agreement among the privileged to respect each other's property rights." The advent of neo-liberalism over the past few decades only illustrates Macpherson's point "that the acquisitive drive of unfettered capitalism poses a stark challenge to liberty and democracy".

Update (May 24):  Right wing prime minister Narendra Modi of India wins re-election by a large margin.

Update (May 26):  An open letter to the president from 76 retired generals, admirals, ambassadors, and diplomats argues against war with Iran.

A war with Iran, either by choice or miscalculation, would produce dramatic repercussions in an already destabilized Middle East and drag the United States into another armed conflict at immense financial, human, and geopolitical cost.

Update (June 4):  Unfortunately, war with Iran is still a possibility.

Update (June 18):  Still itching for war. Will it be Iran or China? Michael Klare:

[T]he Pentagon’s main focus is a rising China, the power believed to pose the greatest threat to America’s long-term strategic interests.

Update (June 19):  Erin Banco reports that

the president has asked officials to tone down their heated rhetoric on Iran, despite the attacks on tanker ships in the Gulf of Oman that Washington has blamed on Tehran. The president has previously said he is less hawkish on Iran than some of his advisers and this week, in a Time magazine interview, said the attacks on the tankers were "very minor."

Update (June 20):  The possibility of war heats up.

[Dear Leader] authorized U.S. military strikes against Iran on Thursday, but officials abruptly pulled back from carrying them out just hours later, The New York Times reported.

Nick Visser gives the background.

On Thursday, Iran shot down an unmanned American spy drone that was flying over the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian government said the aircraft had flown into the country’s airspace, although [Fuckface von Clownstick] said the drone was "clearly" in international waters.

"We have it all documented. It’s documented scientifically, not just words."

Update (June 21):  Apparently Dear Leader himself called off the attack.

[The president] claimed on Friday morning that he’d canceled the strike 10 minutes before its launch out of concern that the likely death toll would not be proportionate to the loss of the unmanned drone.

Heather Digby Parton notes that everyone surrounding Fuckface is for war.

[He] really only cares about one thing: re-election. If they want to convince him to let the bombs fly to prove he's got brass, his hawks are going to have to convince him that his base will love it. They will, of course. They are America's most fervent supporters of military action and if [Manbaby] does it they'll love him all the more.

Also, The Young Turks debate whether this madman deserves credit for stopping a crisis he created.

Update (June 22):  Shep Smith says the president's explanation "just doesn’t make sense". Chris Wallace elaborates:

[D]on’t send mixed messages that confuse not only your enemies but even your allies and people here in this country, as to what you’re going to do.

Biden adviser Colin Kahl adds:

Can any of us take at face value [von Clownstick's] portrayal of events? We don’t even know what the real story is. We have a president who basically runs the same play over and over again, which is: He lights everything on fire and then he pretends to put the fire out and take credit for it.

Update (June 25):  This pattern with Iran is a well-established tactic: since right and wrong don't matter any more, Fuckface is free to manipulate any situation to his political advantage as described by Ari Melber.

It often begins with some kind of tough talk, then a reaction, concern over the public plan announced by a president, but often, in the end, it doesn’t happen. Tweet, hype, but then fold.

The message itself can be the political playoff. [Dear Leader's] base wants to hear about ICE raids, about people being round up, so he gave them days of that message and perception. He may have already decided nothing was going to actually happen, but he gave his people some of the politics they want to hear.

Update (June 28):  John Atcheson notes the tragedy of having solutions in hand, but living in a world that increasingly rejects reality.

At a time when we have to navigate using empiricism, data, observation and skepticism in order to preserve some part of the progress we’ve made, and some of the natural life support systems we rely on, we are increasingly reverting to teleological reasoning in the pursuit of nonsense.  

And so, John Feffer concludes, "voters have gravitated toward right-wing politicians who promise fast results and easy solutions, however illusory those might be".

There are no instruction manuals on how to fix hardware and software simultaneously, on how to address climate change at the same time as fixing the political systems that have hitherto failed to tackle the problem.

Update (January 5, 2020):  We're at renewed risk of war with Iran after Fuckface von Clownstick ordered the assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. There is scant evidence for an imminent attack against U.S. forces. But there's plenty of evidence of projection in a tweet from October 22, 2012:

Don't let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected--be careful Republicans!

Update (January 7, 2020):  It's saying something about how dangerous a war with Iran would be and how much the country doesn't want war when even Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham speak out against it.