History is not there for us to like or dislike it. We cannot erase or change it; but if we learn from it, we might change the future. I'm not trying to create a new aphorism for social media; there are enough of them already. My point is to draw your (and U.S. President Donald Trump’s) attention to Israel’s (nay, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s) bamboozlements.
Not once, but twice, he has already deceived such a humongous nation as the U.S., convincing not one but two Bush presidents. He has been telling us the story about Iran almost ready to produce nuclear weapons within the "next two weeks," for the last 33 years! And, the Israel lobby in the U.S. is so powerful and the sleeper cells of neocons and Zionists are so organized in the U.S. administration (Trump’s included) that America has fallen for it a third time.
Trump must have known that there was no significant enriched uranium in any of the three Iranian facilities; otherwise, he could not risk half a million people’s lives destroying them with his bombers. But the Zionist circle is so strong around him, at the White House and the Pentagon, that he had to yield to them yet again. But he now has half a million anti-American people in the Middle East, because he hit something bigger than Iran.
During the last two weeks, Netanyahu – a wanted criminal suspect by the International Criminal Court and officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes and fraud at the Tel Aviv District Court – once again tried and succeeded in doing it a third time. Like Bush the Senior and Bush the Junior, President Trump was tricked into joining Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear energy installations, claiming they would be used to manufacture nuclear weapons. Following the president and his administration sending mixed messages after Israel started its war against Iran, the White House said that Trump will decide whether or not to join Israel’s bombing of Iranian facilities within the next two weeks while he awaits the outcome of diplomatic efforts between Tehran and Washington. However, in the end, he and his side lost the fight within the U.S. administration.
We hope the destruction and human loss Iran suffered at the hands of Trump will be a wake up call for its clumsy handling of calls for the sixth round of talks and, thus, giving the “Zionist Entity” the green light to start its bombing campaign. Not only the liberal and paleo-conservatives (opposite of neocons) but also the Iranian mullahs should read their history books. When you have such an enemy, which fooled the U.S. to hit Iraq twice and Syria once, you have several things to learn from the recent history of the region.
Let’s not forget the Libya fiasco, too, which was caused by a false report of Martin Sean Indyk, an Australian American diplomat and foreign relations analyst. Indyk has expertise in the Israeli Army and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group. He moved to Washington and became a naturalized citizen, and then a week later, was appointed to the National Security Council and as assistant secretary of state for the Near East. The U.S. and its European accomplices dismembered Libya and killed its leader Moammar Gadhafi, but could not find either the weapons of mass destruction or the traces of a nuclear weapon program that Indyk had reported! Thirty thousand people died, and the country was divided into two.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mariano Grossi’s statement that, “No evidence Iran is building a nuclear weapon!” Not only the text of this statement, but also a video recording of Mr. Grossi, saying, “We did not and do not have any proof of a systematic Iranian effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” are still on the internet. U.S. intelligence authorities did not believe Netanyahu’s lies. Trump also knew there were no nuclear weapons or weapon-quality enriched uranium in Iran. That was probably the reason he said the U.S. bombers targeted “enrichment facilities.”
But Netanyahu, the mind-reader, says Iran has intentions to do it, either in the Natanz Nuclear Facility or in the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant under the Qom Mountains. Israel bombed the former last week. Thank heaven, the IAEA found no radioactive radiation, for either there was really no uranium enrichment activity, or Israel’s strikes were not effective. But Israel could not bomb the latter because it is under a mountain, and Netanyahu needed American bunker-buster bombs designed to penetrate hardened targets or targets buried deep underground. If there was really enriched (that is radioactive) uranium stored there, when the U.S. bombers blasted, would it not put 90 million Iranians and half a million Middle Eastern people in danger of death and sickness?
Now he has fooled the U.S. for the third time. If there was radioactive material, we would be saved from the international and Tel Aviv courts with new lies. Trump would be remembered as the butcher of that many millions of victims of Iranian nuclear radiation. One group of international pundits would say, “Netanyahu was right; it is better to be safe rather than sorry!” Another group would reluctantly wish Israeli leaders to be more careful in the international espionage business. Everything would continue as normal until the next big lie that Zionism will come up with!
That is why, as important as the history books are, professor John Mearsheimer’s seminal book on international lies, "Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics" are crucial.
The New York Times says, Trump buys himself time and opens up some new options. But unfortunately, that opportunity was lost because the people around Trump in the administration couldn’t learn more about why Israeli leaders keep lying to them and how to catch them. This week, three political analysts and authors, Robert Inlakesh on the Russia Today website, Fevzi K. Doğan, in his own blog, and Chaim Levinson in his Haaretz column, penned articles under a similar title.
“Israel’s war on Iran is not about nuclear weapons, it is, and has always been, about regime change and breaking the Axis of Resistance,” Inlakesh claims, meaning the informal coalition of Iranian-supported militant and political organizations across the Middle East. Doğan, on the other hand, concludes that Netanyahu’s lies are motivated to have Trump support him in his quest to remap the Middle East. Levinson thinks Netanyahu is after “historical changes that will be talked about for generations.” All these ideas should not be unusual for the readers of this column.
Basically, Netanyahu’s deception of the U.S. administrations, in particular, and the West, in general, should be analyzed to the hilt and quick, so that not the Israeli people, but the Jewish Zionists and their Christian brethren, the Evangelicals, should not be able to afflict the U.S. with international calamities and embarrassments.
In his book, Mearsheimer provides a systematic analysis of lying as a tool of statecraft, identifying the varieties, the reasons, and the potential costs and benefits. We know that leaders often lie for good strategic reasons, but other kinds of interstate deception besides lying, mainly concealment and spinning, create an atmosphere of distrust among the great powers, resulting sometimes in damaging consequences like the Bush administration's falsehoods about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Trump and those he shoved into the National Security Council should read this rather short book (sorry, no pictures in it!) to prevent yet another disaster this new Netanyahu might cause.
There is a great saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. There are corresponding translations in tens of languages. Arabs, for instance, say, “A believer is not bitten from the same place twice”; Azerbaijani saying is funny: “A donkey would never enter the same mud it has already been in”; Russian saying is challenging: “A clever man won't step on the same rake twice.”
However, Trump could not reject Netanyahu’s power over Americans to make them believe in absurdities; French philosopher Voltaire reminds us that such a person can also make you commit atrocities. He participated in this shameless liar’s war, which is not a justifiable war. It is not against terrorism; there are no threats from Iran to the U.S. You could make Iran sign a deal preventing them from having nuclear weapons and not to wipe Israel off the map! Alas, Netanyahu torpedoed Trump’s negotiations with Iran. America will never get fed up with Netanyahu’s lies.
