Friends + Interlocutors,

I certainly don’t waste my time watching CNN. Or Fox News for that matter. The latter has evolved into a non-stop propaganda machine for Donald Trump. It’s ludicrous and boring.

As for CNN, it is struggling to find its identity after losing the ratings war with Fox. CNN is part of the American establishment and is in every airport in the world. I’m not sure this is what Ted Turner envisioned.

A guy named Brett McGurk is the “global affairs” analyst for CNN. He has worked for every White House administration from G.W. Bush through Donald Trump. You can’t succeed like that if you develop any original ideas or resist the official neocon/neoliberal narrative for U.S. foreign policy.

Quite by accident, I saw McGurk being interviewed by Caitlin Collins tonight on the subject of Iran. It was annoying. Here’s the takeaway. According to him, the Venezuela solution has been abandoned. The decapitation strategy—that is, the murder of Iran’s supreme religious leader and his immediate entourage—did not result in the collapse of Iran. This was Trump’s ideal solution. It failed.

So regime change is off the table as well, at least for the moment. No problem. What is the goal now? Simple, according to McGurk. In coordination with Israel, use the U.S. military to degrade Iran so it implodes into another basket case like Syria and Iraq. (My language.) That’s the mission. McGurk suggests the project will last only a few more weeks. Then Israel and Washington can maintain a free-fly kill zone over Iran.

The pretext or justification for this fantastic and expensive military campaign, you will recall, was something about nuclear weapons which the USG knew Iran did not possess and was not trying to make. And then there was the fantasy about Iran waging a 47-year war against America. 

McGurk embraced that nonsense in passing, as if it were an established fact and not just Israeli propaganda. He calls it “power projection”. Evidently, only Tel Aviv and Washington can be in that business. 

Recall what I wrote on March 3rd, “Regime change would be nice, but not required. It seems to me that severe degradation of Iran would be sufficient to satisfy Tel Aviv and Washington. Iran's leadership has been murdered and the country is being bombed to hell and back by the US military, which has become a de facto branch of the IDF.” 

That is the sorry place we find ourselves in today. Where we go from here is anybody’s guess. 

Patrick

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