Loony Lindsey

Many people are offering reactions to the Iran deal, but so far, the looniest assessment was delivered by Lindsey Graham.

“If the initial reports regarding the details of this deal hold true, there’s no way as president of the United States I would honor this deal,” Graham said. “It’s incredibly dangerous for our national security, and it’s akin to declaring war on Sunni Arabs and Israel by the P5+1 because it ensures their primary antagonist Iran will become a nuclear power and allows them to rearm conventionally.”

Good Christ. It has been apparent for a while now that the neocons have taken sides in the Sunni/Shiite conflict -- a conflict which has nothing to do with our own culture or history. But I never expected to see someone like Graham be so freakin' obvious about it.

Newsflash, Lindsey: It wasn't the Shiites who attacked us on 9/11. It was the Sunnis.

Al Qaeda is a fanatically Sunni organization.

So is ISIS, which is committing any number of barbaric acts against the Shiites in Syria and Iraq.

As we speak, the most important of the Sunni powers -- Saudi Arabia -- is committing massive, unforgivable, unprovoked atrocities in Yemen, with the aid of the United States.

It is absolute madness to aver that the Iran deal amounts to "declaring war" against the Sunnis or anyone else. The Sunni states are the ones who have unleashed the beasts of war.

“Hillary Clinton’s reaction to this deal is the first real test of her ability to be president and her judgment,” said Graham. “If she believes it’s a good idea to lift the arms embargo without first seeing a behavior change by the Iranians, then her judgment as commander in chief will be very much in question.”

No, I do not want to see a behavior change by the Iranians. The Iranians have not initiated a military conflict since the 18th century; for more than two hundred years, all of their wars have been defensive. I would prefer to see them maintain that kind of behavior.

Also, the Iranians are the ones doing most of the ground-level fighting against ISIS, at the invitation of the grateful Iraqi and Syrian governments. I don't want them to change that behavior, either.

You know whose behavior needs to change? The United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. They are the ones who should repent of their brutish, warmongering ways.

Eric Margolis tells the story that clowns like Lindsey Graham don't want Americans to hear...

The UN’s refugee czar, Antonio Guterres, just asserted that there are now 4,013,000 Syrian refugees outside their homeland, and another 7.6 million as internal refugees from the war raging there since 2011.

That total’s some 11.6 million refugees- a staggering 50% of Syria’s population.

The Bush administration, prompted by Israel, toyed with the idea of toppling Syria’s Assad regime but it backed down when a few smart minds in Washington asked who would the US get to replace the existing government? Syria’s main opposition came from the outlawed, underground Muslim Brotherhood that spoke for Syria’s long-repressed Sunni majority. Washington wanted no part of the Muslim Brothers. Better the Asads, who quietly cooperated with Washington in spite of being backed by Iran.

But in 2009-2010, Washington changed policy. As anti-Iranian war fever in the US mounted, the White House demanded that Tehran renounce its alliance with Iran, or else.

He meant "Damascus," obviously. (He also misspelled "Assad.")

The plan was to isolate Iran prior to its being attacked. But Syria refused to cut its vital ties to Tehran.

So Syria was marked for regime change. Washington was fed up with Arab leaders who defied the writ of the American Raj. The Assads would meet the same grisly fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Khadaffi.

In spring, 2011, anti-Assad guerillas, armed and trained in Jordan by CIA, infiltrated from Lebanon into southern Syria at Deraa. This was the squalid little town in which Lawrence of Arabia was captured by the Turks. Derna was a hotbed of anti-government agitation. Soon, more US proxy rebels infiltrated across the Lebanese border. British and French special forces joined the rebels. Saudi Arabia provided the financing.

France, former colonial ruler of Syria and Lebanon, was particularly interested in re-asserting its influence in the Levant and the oil-rich Gulf states. Israel was convinced that overthrowing the Asad regime in Damascus would isolate its two main enemies, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbullah movement, leaving the latter vulnerable to a new Israel attack.

A propaganda blitz was unleashed against Syria’s President Assad, branding him the butcher of the Middle East. This was nonsense. The mild-mannered Assad was a former London-trained ophthalmologist who became Syria’s leader when his older brother Basil was killed in a car crash. The Assad regime had some very tough, nasty senior figures, but certainly no worse or more brutal than many other American Mideast allies like Egypt, Iraq, Algeria or Morocco.

No matter. Bashar Assad became America’s new Mideast devil and the object of western-engineered regime change.

And that's why the US/Saudi/Turkey/Israel alliance created the Nusra Front and ISIS.

“America’s Salafists” were the cutting edge of Washington’s grand Mideast strategy, developed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to divided and rule by turning Sunni Muslims and Shia against one another. Results in Iraq were spectacular. The idea was to do the same again in Syria, where a minority Shia regime ruled a sullen, restive Sunni majority.

The result, as we have seen, is the relentless destruction of Syria by civil war.

Margolis emphasizes a point on which far too many Americans remain ignorant: Our insane determination to topple Assad (at the behest of Sunnis and Israelis) has resulted in the persecution and destruction of Syria's Christians, who were protected by the non-sectarian Assad government.

Syria’s anti-regime groups could not continue fighting without arms, munitions, medical supplies, radios and cash from the western powers. Washington’s fatuous claims it is deploying “moderate” jihads is a sour joke. The US is fully backing the region’s extremists against one of its oldest secular regimes.

And yet Lindsey Graham wants us to believe that Iran is the country that needs a "behavior change."

Iran. Not the United States.

Lindsey is indeed a clown. An evil clown.