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Under the (Persian) volcano
Iran and Russia, both sanctioned to oblivion, are indeed in synch like never before, coordinating everything on a shared front.
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Washington, on the Ukraine front, may be switching to total Saving Face mode. After all, the scale of the strategic defeat for the Empire plus the discombobulated West in country 404 is staggering. Add to it the strategic defeat in Iran plus Yemen relentlessly hammering the House of Saud. Grandmaster Lavrov coined it: “The West will never again be the main player, dictating terms.”
The temptation may be great to identify a more straightforward path towards a multi-nodal, polycentric world order – in the wake of all those wild, unprecedented Trump concessions to Moscow. But then the real dark clouds keep coming down.
The death cult in West Asia and the Epstein Syndicate as a whole have managed to overpower the whole mass of neo-con Russophobes spread across the MICIMATT (military/industrial/congressional/intelligence/media/academia/think tank complex, in the memorable definition by Ray McGovern) and reconstitute Iran as the undisputable, one and only national security emergency.
The 7-point way or the highway
Field Marshal Asim Munir’s hasty, last minute-arranged trip from Islamabad to Tehran earlier this week in the end could not possibly mediate anything.
Munir met everyone who matters. He asked Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf point blank: what does it take to find a solution for the Iran-U.S. impasse? Ghalibaf was blunt – and repeated it at last 8 times during their meeting: Washington must implement Iran’s 7-point conditions, essentially a summary of the serially dead cat memorandum of understanding (MoU), which Trump signed and then destroyed.
The 7 points were first proposed to Tweedledum and Twedledee – Witkoff and Kushner – via the Qataris in a previous round of Iran-U.S. indirect negotiations.
President Pezeshkian and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Mohsen Rezaee, in their meetings, stressed the exact same thing. That’s the message Munir should relay to the Sociopath-in-Chief.
Official Iranian sources will not confirm it; only the heavily-spun American version. But Munir may have carried a final U.S. ultimatum to Rezaee, Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf: ditch your nuclear program, or face massive strikes, mostly targeting Pickaxe Mountain.
Adding on the 7 points, Mohsen Rezaee actually informed Munir – and thus the White House – again, that not a single speck of nuclear dust will leave Iran. Back to the only possibility of a return to negotiations: Washington must accept the 7 points.
Foreign Minister Araghchi keeps coming back to the essentials: “The U.S. has failed to achieve any of its war objectives.” So the connectivity chain is inescapable: no military victory (and no regime change); unbearable economic costs; untainable political situation; thus only off-ramp is the 7 points.
And on top of it Tehran runs the clock.
In parallel, across the Yemeni Storm, Sana’a also runs the clock.
With Aramco, the lifeblood of U.S., Israel and Salafi-jihadi goons of the ISIS mould, and a privileged source of funding for the Forever Wars, now in Ansarallah’s direct line of fire, the Yemeni drive is to work “to dry up the sources of terrorism.”
Riyadh though is doubling down, threatening to bomb every gathering of Yemeni tribes. If that happens, more than a million more Yemenis will join the Yemeni Armed Forces and march to the Yemeni-Saudi border.
After all the tribes, well-trained and ultra-weaponized, are just waiting for a directive from Ansarallah’s leader, Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, to pour into southern “Saudi” Arabia and recover the three provinces, Najran, Jizan and Asir, that are ancestral Yemeni lands stolen by the Brits in 1934.
A price you can’t afford to pay
All hell may break loose: now; soon; or until the end of November at the latest. Were it to happen sooner, before the Israeli elections, it’s a done deal the driver is the death cult. The Sociopath-in-Chief privileges a post-mid-terms attack.
The death cult is preparing a massive attack on Iranian power plants, oil infrastructure, military targets and nuclear installations. Tehran has repeatedly warned that any attack, joint or separate, from the U.S. and Israel, will be treated as Totalen Krieg, all-out war, and the response will break any limits or restraint.
Iran’s internal intel is fully concentrated on a large-scale bombing scenario happening before next Tuesday, Election Day in the death cult.
Whatever happens, Tehran’s response will make sure the price to pay is beyond prohibitive. On Israel, Iran will counterpunch on both of Israel’s refineries; the ports at Haifa and Ashdod; all airbases; and Dimona added only if Iran’s own nuclear sites are hit.
When it comes to a U.S. attack, any Gulf petro-monarchy that hosts any launch instantly becomes a legitimate target, including power grids; desalination plants; refineries; ports; data centers; HQs and installations of American companies.
The Strait of Hormuz would be completely closed. The price of a barrel of oil will skyrocket. The global economy will hit Big Depression. From an imperial point of view, that will be as gloomy as Washington letting Iran manage the Strait of Hormuz and charge fees for transit: actually the humiliating end of unilateral thalassocracy – complete with the U.S. Fifth Fleet needing to ask permission to enter or leave its own dilapidated base in Bahrain.
Mohammad Mokhber, a top adviser to Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, stressed that “if the U.S.-Israel strike our petrochemical infrastructure or power plants, Iran will strike nine countries.”
Moreover, the Fars news agency, very close to the IRGC, learned about an array of new directives: if the attacks involve the assassination of Iranian officials and the killing of civilians, the Iranian response will include political targets associated with the U.S. and all nations participating in the war, in addition to their infrastructure.
Lavrov and Araghchi revive RIC
Amidst so much horror, let’s try to stress at least one auspicious trend. During Lavrov’s recent visit to Tehran, Iranian FM Araghchi cut to the chase:
“Never in our History have Russia & Iran worked as closely as now.”
The key operative concept is “Never in our History”. Lavrov and Araghchi talked about “everything from Europe to West Asia”. But specially these four: Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine & Yemen. Not to mention everything about expanded economic and “nuclear cooperation”.
Economic cooperation means specially the INSTC – the International North South Transportation Corridor linking 3 BRICS/SCO partners: Russia, Iran and India.
See my INSTC documentary shot in Iran last year.
The Empire of Chaos relies on sanctions, threats and bombing. Eurasia integration relies on building infrastructure, increasing trade, and sovereign cooperation. So Lavrov and Araghchi once again had to revive RIC: the original Russia/India/China connection first conceptualized as the Primakov Triangle but now with Iran in place of India.
Lavrov proposed that the new RIC establish a “common security structure” in the Persian Gulf via a trilateral summit. That amounts to RIC defining a unified framework for the Strait of Hormuz.
The Empire’s response will be increased discombobulation. Because once again this is about “indivisibility of security” – as in Russia proposing it to the U.S. and NATO in December 2021. Then that was met with a non-response response.
On Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine and Yemen, Lavrov and Araghchi were on top of the top frontlines. Where we have the Empire of Chaos and its allies/vassals on one side, and Russia and Iran’s allies on the other side.
It’s all interconnected, of course. An imperial arc of military pressure stretches from Ukraine to Yemen. The counterpunch revolves around how to coordinate the resistance (italics mine) to such pressure.
On economic cooperation, both Iran and Russia are under a tsunami of sanctions. Their banks are expelled from SWIFT, and oil exports are severely restricted. So trade between them must bypass the U.S. dollar; the whole Western financial system; and the thalassocracy enforced by the U.S. Navy.
Know how in bypassing sanctions is something Iran-Russia may share with the whole Global South, via settlements in local currencies; barter trade; overland corridors; the INSTC; and trade across the Caspian Sea.
And that brings us once again to the Strait of Hormuz – which Iran controls. The Gulf petro-monarchies are completely freaking out. Russia maintains solid channels with both Iran and the Gulf. Lavrov is in total synch with all of them. He brought the Gulf’s concerns to Tehran, and in turn, conveyed Tehran’s conditions back to the Gulf.
Lavrov stressed that the serially dead cat Islamabad MoU is the only way to go. Exactly what Xi told Trump at the Oval Office. Exactly what the Iranian leadership told Asim Munir in Tehran.
He also stressed that the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies must get their act together and start a serious security dialogue with Iran and Arab nations, including neighbors such as Iraq and Jordan, and involve the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
Once again: indivisibility of security.
Iran and Russia, both sanctioned to oblivion, are indeed in synch like never before, coordinating everything on a shared front – while the desperate Epstein Syndicate remains stuck in its self-concocted Forever War nightmare.
