Discussion of the ‘Israeli-US bloodbath’ on Iran’s Press TV yesterday

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Until about four months ago, I was a frequent guest on Iran’s global English-language news service, Press TV, mostly for analysis of Russia-related issues. Then there was a long pause during which my most frequent host has been the Indian television network WION.  Yesterday, Teheran kindly invited me back to join Professor Anthony Hall of Lethbridge University in Alberta, Canada in a 24-minute long discussion of latest developments in the Israel-Gaza war.

http://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/127826

My fellow panelist is quite passionate and no doubt many viewers will approve of his engagement. I fully agree with him that the scale of atrocities being perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians does not allow any of us to avoid taking sides in a very public manner.

The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping were mentioned in passing on the show, as was the visit of US Defense Secretary Austin to Israel, though the two events were not linked in our discussion. Let me do that now, when the efforts during this visit by Austin to build a coalition of the willing to provide security to ships passing through the Red Sea were announced this morning.

I spoke yesterday about the caution that all state and non-state actors in the Middle East have been demonstrating since the early days of October to avoid escalation of the conflict to a regional or global level. This also applies to what has been said about Austin’s coalition for securing shipping in the Red Sea. Apparently the emphasis is on putting in place convoys to accompany the commercial vessels and so protect them against boarding parties, and also putting in place military vessels with capabilities to shoot down attacking missiles and drones.  Note that there is not a word about directly attacking Yemen. And the reason should be clear:  a U.S.-led attack on the Yemeni Houthis would be tantamount to a declaration of war against their backers, Iran. It would instantly escalate the conflict to a regional war that would swiftly escalate further to a global war in which the key protagonists would be the United States and…Russia, who are the allies in all but name of the Iranians.

As I said yesterday on these pages, everything is interconnected, as even the densest among us like Austin and his colleagues in the Biden administration understand.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Diskussion über das “israelisch-amerikanische Blutbad” im iranischen Press TV gestern

Bis vor etwa vier Monaten war ich ein häufiger Gast bei Irans weltweitem englischsprachigem Nachrichtensender Press TV, meist mit Analysen zu Russland betreffenden Themen. Dann gab es eine lange Pause, in der der indische Fernsehsender WION mein häufigster Gastgeber war. Gestern lud mich Teheran freundlicherweise wieder ein, mit Professor Anthony Hall von der Universität Lethbridge in Alberta, Kanada, in einer 24-minütigen Diskussion über die jüngsten Entwicklungen im Krieg zwischen Israel und Gaza zu sprechen.

http://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/127826

Mein Gesprächspartner ist sehr leidenschaftlich, und zweifellos werden viele Zuschauer sein Engagement gutheißen. Ich stimme ihm voll und ganz zu, dass das Ausmaß der Gräueltaten, die Israel an den Palästinensern verübt, es keinem von uns erlaubt, nicht in aller Öffentlichkeit Partei zu ergreifen.

Die Angriffe der Houthi auf Schiffe im Roten Meer wurden in der Sendung nur am Rande erwähnt, ebenso wie der Besuch von US-Verteidigungsminister Austin in Israel, obwohl die beiden Ereignisse in unserer Diskussion nicht miteinander verbunden wurden. Das möchte ich jetzt nachholen, nachdem heute Morgen die Bemühungen von Austin angekündigt wurden, während seines Besuchs eine Koalition der Willigen zu bilden, um die Sicherheit von Schiffen, die das Rote Meer passieren, zu gewährleisten.

Ich habe gestern über die Vorsicht gesprochen, die alle staatlichen und nichtstaatlichen Akteure im Nahen Osten seit Anfang Oktober an den Tag gelegt haben, um eine Eskalation des Konflikts auf regionaler oder globaler Ebene zu vermeiden. Dies gilt auch für das, was über die Koalition von Austin zur Sicherung der Schifffahrt im Roten Meer gesagt wurde. Offenbar liegt der Schwerpunkt auf der Einrichtung von Konvois, die die Handelsschiffe begleiten und sie so vor Enterungen schützen, sowie auf der Einrichtung von Militärschiffen, die in der Lage sind, angreifende Raketen und Drohnen abzuschießen. Von einem direkten Angriff auf den Jemen ist mit keinem Wort die Rede. Der Grund dafür dürfte klar sein: Ein von den USA geführter Angriff auf die jemenitischen Houthis wäre gleichbedeutend mit einer Kriegserklärung an deren Unterstützer, den Iran. Damit würde der Konflikt sofort zu einem regionalen Krieg eskalieren, der sich rasch zu einem globalen Krieg ausweiten würde, in dem die Hauptakteure die Vereinigten Staaten und Russland wären, das nicht nur dem Namen nach Verbündeter der Iraner ist.

Wie ich gestern auf diesen Seiten sagte, ist alles miteinander verbunden, was selbst die unterbelichtetsten unter uns wie Austin und seine Kollegen in der Biden-Regierung verstehen.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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4 thoughts on “Discussion of the ‘Israeli-US bloodbath’ on Iran’s Press TV yesterday”

  1. Boarding parties are one thing; shooting down.drones is another. And then there is the willingness of shippers being comfortable to acknowledge that their vessels are going through a war zone. Three cheers for the coalition of the willing.

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  2. This is a Betty Crocker recipe for a casus belli. Will the American public fall for it? I’m going to check with PT Barnum right now.

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  3. The blindingly obvious reason that Operation Prospery Guardian is a waste of time lies with the fact that the world’s biggest container shipping lines have already decided to avoid the Red Sea / Suez Canal. They’re going around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. Try getting insurance for plying a war zone, thereby allowing you to risk your ships and cargo to Houthi attack, damage and loss. Impossible to obtain such insurance because insurers are not dumb. There’s no chance of recompense for damage or loss in such cases. So even with a convoy and undermanned US warships bristling with second-rate weapons “protecting” their ships, no shipping company is going to risk the Red Sea route for now.

    So what will Austin’s convoy protection scheme of various countries’ warships escort? Each other! Well whoop-de-doo, a waste of time. But then Austin is a waste of time writ large, as he appears to be completely clueless on many things. Arrive in Israel and tell them to tone down the killing of Palestinians blah blah blah while the US military airlift of weapons and ammo to Israel continues apace at the same airport. I mean, just how incredibly dumb can he and the Biden administration be? Completely, irrevocably stupid, with a stance and a line of utter gibberish a five year-old could see through. So dumb that if they had regular jobs, the boss would have fired them all for gross incompetence several years ago.

    No wonder Russia cannot understand these feverishly incompetent blowhards. The wonder is that the European countries apparently do. It’s beyond my ken, but the Europeans are obviously as stupid as the US is. Pure blind hatred of Russia and Muslims can be the only reason, because otherwise the total irrationality of the West’s actions cannot be explained. Shooting oneself in the foot over and over again and not minding the pain must be a special Western trait.

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    1. Europeans got a free ride on defense spending ever since the end of WW2. Thus they were free to spend lavishly on social welfare programs and posture as global peaceniks while living securely under the protection of the U.S. armed forces and nuclear umbrella. It was feeble-minded Joe Biden’s overreach in Ukraine that burst the Europeans 75+ year bubble. The U.S. not only provoked a war with Russia, disrupting fuel deliveries from Russia to Europe, but then blew up the Nordstream pipeline to ensure that there would be no retreat for Germany, at a minimum. Since then, European nations have revealed themselves to be nothing more than vassal states of the U.S. hegemonic empire in the Western hemisphere. Only Viktor Orban (and to some extent Erdogan) has had the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the Empire though more recently there have been rumblings in other Eastern European states. The sniveling, cowardly E.U. regularly cooks up some sort of economic punishment for Hungary and Orban, as they have also done to Poland and post-Brexit U.K. When have Europeans elected busybody Von der Leyen or the squidly Charles Michel, let alone Jens Stoltenberg or Joseph Borrell to lord over every aspect of their lives? Someone has to do the bidding of the U.S. Empire and neither Olaf Scholz nor Macron are about to lift a finger to oppose them. Solidarity brothers and sisters, or else.

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