Antiwar.com Blog

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave another one of his typical U.N. speeches last week in which he accused Iran of having a “secret atomic warehouse”:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told the United Nations on Thursday that his intelligence agents had discovered a “secret atomic warehouse” in downtown Tehran, escalating a growing confrontation with Iran and setting up a direct challenge to its government to open the facility to inspectors and prove it is not in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran denied the accusation, and Netanyahu’s claim was subjected to widespread ridicule in Iran. The location of the facility that he identified was in a remote village whose name, Torquzabad, called to mind the Farsi expression for “nowhere land,” and the building that he identified as the warehouse is a former carpeting cleaning site. Holly Dagres describes the reaction from Iranians:

A group of young Iranian men wasted no time and visited this so-called nowhere land right after Netanyahu’s speech. “Don’t bother coming here – there’s nothing here,” they laugh in a video popularly shared on social media. Since the video, Iranians are now using the Persian carpet cleaning facility site as an opportunity to post selfies. At least two were featured on the frontpage of Iranian newspapers. Even the Chief of Staff for the Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, weighed-in on the speech on Twitter with the Persian hashtag #Torquzabad and a photo of himself and other high ranking officials laughing.

Continue reading “Netanyahu’s ‘Nowhere Land’ Blunder”

President Trump’s Interior Secretary warned in a recent speech that Russia’s energy sales abroad could be prevented with a US naval blockade. The head of the Russian senate’s foreign affairs committee rightly responded that this would be an act of war. Why is the US so determined to prevent trade and commerce? Why does Washington’s first reaction always seem to be threats of force? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Ron Paul says it all! Here’s the concluding speech from last month’s Ron Paul Institute Media & War conference in Washington, DC. Did you make it to the conference? Hope to see you at a future event. Enjoy Dr. Paul’s speech:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Nicholas Kristof has written an excellent column attacking U.S. support for the war on Yemen:

The United States is not directly bombing civilians in Yemen, but it is providing arms, intelligence and aerial refueling to assist Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they hammer Yemen with airstrikes, destroy its economy and starve its people. The Saudi aim is to crush Houthi rebels who have seized Yemen’s capital and are allied with Iran.

That’s sophisticated realpolitik for you: Because we dislike Iran’s ayatollahs, we are willing to starve Yemeni schoolchildren.

It can’t be emphasized enough that US policy in Yemen is both deeply immoral and irrational. Our government is a partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity ostensibly because of an exaggerated fear of Iranian influence, but even if the latter weren’t exaggerated there is no way to justify what is being done to the people of Yemen. US interests are not advanced in the slightest by the coalition’s war, but any limited benefit would be outweighed by the horrifying costs imposed on a country whose people have done nothing to us. Destroying and starving Yemen does nothing to harm Iran (a dubious goal in itself), but it is inflicting massive suffering on tens of millions of people and destabilizing the entire area for years and possibly decades to come. Even if the worst-case scenario is avoided and millions don’t die from famine, widespread malnutrition has already devastated the health and development of an entire generation.

Continue reading “Our Immoral and Irrational Yemen Policy”

A peace deal will not be concluded among the United States, North Korea, and South Korea in the next three to five years predicts Lawrence Wilkerson, a College of William & Mary professor and the former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a recent interview with host Aaron Maté at The Real News.

Wilkerson points to “irreconcilable elements” as supporting his conclusion. These irreconcilable elements, says Wilkerson, are “China’s interest in not having a unified Korea with US presence still there, the North’s interest in not surrendering all of its nuclear weapons capability, the South’s interest ultimately in – if it is a unified peninsula – having those nuclear weapons itself, and, ultimately, both Koreas – were they to be united – wanting themselves to kick the United States presence off the peninsula.”

Continue reading “Lawrence Wilkerson: ‘Irreconcilable Elements’ Stand in Way of Korean Deal”