Friends + Interlocutors,

Herewith an i-Photo I took this evening of a 1996 article in the International Herald Tribune (Paris) by William Pfaff. He is one of my heroes. He was regarded as the dean of foreign policy correspondents. Luckily I clipped out the article back then, because it is not online now. It is a crying shame that a compilation of Pfaff’s IHT articles has not been made into a book. He passed away in 2015.

 

I am prompted to send it along due to a recent eye-opening video of Tucker Carlson interviewing nuclear weapons expert Ivana Hughes of Columbia University. At the moment it is my understanding that the world is at sea with respect to nuclear weapons and the missiles which launch them. There are no limitations. It is a free-for-all. We have taken for granted that such weapons will never be used either voluntarily or by accident. I am not so confident.

We have just watched Israel, which I regard as an unhinged terrorist state, carpet-bomb an Arab next-door neighbor with the full approval and support of Washington. Nuclear weapons were not used, but Israel has them, having stolen uranium from the U.S. with the help of American CIA master counter-spy James Jesus Angleton. 

For decades Tel Aviv had an obsession to persuade Washington to bomb Iran on the false premise that Iran was also working to obtain an atomic bomb. Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby finally succeeded in getting Donald Trump to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities recently, even though they were not producing nuclear weapons. This was irresponsible and stupid in the extreme, but not surprising.

In the meantime, NATO, at the direction of Washington’s neocon/neoliberal foreign policy cabal, instigated a war between Russia and Ukraine starting back in 2014 and even before. This in turn has resulted in a European rush to expand military capabilities and arms manufacturing. Russia has more nuclear weapons than anybody. The upshot is that Europe is now in danger due to American malfeasance.

Clearly we are headed in the wrong direction and, in my view, Washington is largely at fault. It is time to pay attention to what William Pfaff proposed decades ago in the aftermath of the Cold War. 

Patrick

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