The Many Matryoska Dolls to Pindostan’s Way of Imagining Iran
Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture, Jan 20 2020
On Sep 17 1656, Oliver Cromwell, who had just won a civil war and had the English king beheaded in public, railed against England’s enemies. There was, he told Parliament that day, an axis of evil abroad in the world and this axis, led by Catholic Spain, was at root the problem of a people that had placed themselves at the service of evil. This evil, and the servitude that it begat, was “the evil of a religion that refused the English peoples’ desire for simple liberties, an evil that put men under restraint, under which there was no freedom and under which there could be no liberty of individual consciousness.” That was how Cromwell saw Catholic Spain in 1656 and it is very close to how key orientations in Pindostan see Iran today: the evil of religion subjecting Iranians to repression and to serfdom. In Europe, this ideological struggle against the evil of an imposed religious community brought Europe to near-Armageddon, with the worst affected parts of Europe seeing their population decimated by up to 60% during the conflict. Is this faction in Pindostan now intent on invoking a new near-Armageddon in order to destroy the religious community known as the Shi’a Resistance Axis seen to stretch across the region in order to preserve the Jewish “peoples’ desire for simple liberties”? Today’s leaders of this ideological faction are no longer Puritan Protestants, though the Christian Evangelicals are at one with Cromwell’s Biblical literalism and prophecy, its lead ideologues are the neocons, who have leveraged Karl Popper’s hugely influential The Open Society and its Enemies, a seminal treatise which largely shapes how many Pindos imagine their ‘world’. Popper understood history as a series of attempts by the forces of reaction to smother an open society with the weapons of traditional religion and traditional culture: Marx and Russia were cast as the archetypal reactionary threat to open societies. This construct was taken up by Reagan, and re-connected to the Christian apocalyptic tradition (hence the neo-conservative coalition with Evangelists yearning for Redemption, and with liberal interventionists, yearning for a secular millenarianism). All concur that Iran is reactionary and furthermore that it poses a grave threat to Israel’s self-proclaimed open society. The point here is that there is little point in arguing with these people that Iran poses no threat to Pindostan, which is obvious, for the ‘project’ is ideological through and through. It has to be understood by these lights. Popper’s purpose was to propose that only liberal globalism would bring about a “growing measure of humane and enlightened life” and a free and open society. All this is but the outer Matryoshka, a suitable public rhetoric, a painted image that can be used to encase the secret, inner dolls. Eli Lake, writing in Bloomberg gives away the next doll:
Since Pres Trump ordered the drone strike that killed [Soleimani] … a handful of Trump’s advisers, however, [espied another] strategic benefit to killing Soleimani: Call it regime disruption … The case for disruption is outlined in a series of unclassified memos sent to [John Bolton] in May-Jun 2019 … Their author, David Wurmser, is a longtime adviser to Bolton who then served as a consultant to the NSC. Wurmser argues that Iran is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Its leadership, he writes, is divided between camps that seek an apocalyptic return of the Hidden Imam, and those that favour of the preservation of the Islamic Republic. All the while, many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime’s incompetence and corruption. Wurmser’s crucial insight: were unexpected, rule-changing actions taken against Iran, it would confuse the regime. It would need to scramble. It would rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the regime depends for stability and survival. Such a moment of confusion, Wurmser writes, will create momentary paralysis, and the perception among the Iranian public that its leaders are weak. Wurmser’s memos show that the Trump administration has been debating the blow against Soleimani since the current crisis began, some seven months ago … After Iran downed a Pindo drone, Wurmser advised Bolton that the Pindo response should be overt and designed to send a message that Pindostan holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. Wurmser wrote in a Jun 22 memo: “This could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies.” In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran. He says the Pindo response “does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be).” Rather, he stresses that the Pindo response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime’s domestic legitimacy crisis.
So there it is. David Wurmser is the doll within: no military invasion, but just a strategy to blow apart the Iranian Republic. Eli Lake reveals that Wurmser has quietly been advising Bolton and the Trump Admin all along. This was the neo-con who in 1996 compiled Coping with Crumbling States, which flowed on from the infamous Clean Break paper written for Netanyahu as a blueprint for destructing Israel’s enemies. Both these papers advocated the overthrow of the secular Arab nationalist states, excoriated both as “crumbling relics of the evil USSR” and inherently hostile to Israel, the real message. Wurmser has now been at work as the author of how to ‘implode’ and destroy Iran. And his insight? “A targeted strike on someone like Soleimani”; split the Iranian leadership into warring factions; cut an open wound into the flesh of Iran’s domestic legitimacy; put a finger into that open wound and twist it; disrupt and pretend that Pindostan sides with the Iranian people, against its government. In his Bloomberg piece, Eli Lake seems to think that the Wurmser strategy has worked. Really? The problem here is that narratives in Faschingstein are so far apart from the reality that exists on the ground. They simply do not touch at any point. Millions attended Soleimani’s cortege. His killing gave a renewed cohesion to Iran. Little more than a dribble have protested. Now let us unpack the next doll: Trump bought into Wurmser’s play, albeit admitting subsequently that he ordered the assassination under intense pressure from Thug Senators. Maybe he believed the patently absurd narrative that Iranians would ‘be dancing in the street’ at Soleimani’s killing. Trump is not exactly noted for admitting his mistakes. Rather, when something is portrayed as his error, the President adopts the full ‘salesman’ persona, trying to convince his base that the murder was no error, but a great strategic success. Trump claimed of protestors in Iran: “They like us!” Tom Luongo has observed:
Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate begins next week, and it’s clear that this will not be a walk in the park for the President. Anyone dismissing this because the Thugs hold the Senate, simply do not understand why this impeachment exists in the first place. It is the ultimate form of leverage over a President whose desire to end the wars in the Middle East is anathema to the entrenched powers in the DC Swamp.
Here we arrive at another inner Matryoshka. This is Luongo’s point: Impeachment was the leverage to drive open a wedge between Thug neocons in the Senate and Trump. Now Pelosi’s pressure on Thug Senators is escalating. The Establishment threw cold water over Trump’s assertion of imminent attack as justification for murdering Soleimani, and Trump responds by painting himself further into a corner on Iran, by going the full salesman ‘monte.’ On the campaign trail, the President goes way over the top, calling Soleimani a “son of a bitch“ who killed “thousands” and furthermore was responsible for every Pindo veteran who lost a limb in Iraq, and he then conjures up a fantasy picture of protesters pouring onto the streets of Tehran, tearing down images of Soleimani and screaming abuse at the Iranian leadership. It is nonsense. There are no mass protests. There have been a few hundred students protesting at one main Tehran University. But Trump has dived in pretty deep now, threatening the E3 signatories to the JCPoA that unless they brand Iran as having defaulted on JCPoA at the UNSC disputes mechanism, he will slap a 25% tariff on their automobiles. How will Trump avoid plunging in even deeper to conflict, if and when Pindos die in Iraq or Syria at the hands of militia, and when Pompeo or Lindsay Graham will claim baldly: “Iran’s proxies did it!” Sending emollient faxes to the Swiss to pass to Tehran will not do. Tehran will not read them, nor believe them even if they do. It all reeks of a set-up, a very clever stage-management designed to end with Pindostan crossing Iran’s red line by striking at a target within Iranian territory. Finally, we arrive at the innermost doll. Cui bono? Some Senators who never liked Trump, and would prefer Pence as President; the Demagogs, who would prefer to run their candidate against Pence in November, rather than Trump. But also, as someone who once worked with Wurmser observed tartly: when you hear that name, immediately you think Netanyahu, his intimate associate. Matryoshka herself?
David Wurmser is helping Trump take down Iran
Robert Bridge, RT.com, Jan 20 2020
Despite Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp and reduce the Pentagon’s global footprint, a chief architect of the 2003 Iraq War has the ear of the White House on Iran. What could possibly go wrong? As Donald Trump’s first term dwindles, it appears his new campaign slogan will be: if you can’t beat the swamp, join it. That much seems evident not only from the Trump administration’s courting of diehard hawks like Elliott Abrams and Mike Pompeo, but by the recent news that David Wurmser was offering counsel to John Bolton, former NSA to the White House. It should be briefly recalled that Wurmser, who has worked for a number of think tanks including the influential AEI, contributed heavily to the report that argued Saddam Hussein was harboring WMDs. That claim was eventually proven to be false, but not before a whole lot of damage was done. The outcome of the disastrous 2003 Iraq War that followed in the wake of that ‘bad intelligence’ is well documented by now, with the Iraqi people still suffering the consequences. According to journalist Eli Lake, Wurmser built the case for “regime disruption” against Iran in a series of memos sent to Bolton in May-Jun 2019, a period when tensions between Tehran and Faschingstein were peaking in the Persian Gulf. Lake, who says he was privy to the memos thanks to a high-level source, provides a glimpse into Wurmser’s hawkish thought processes, revealing he told Bolton that offensive military action against Iran would “rattle the delicate internal balance of forces which the regime depends for stability and survival.” On another occasion after Iran had downed a Pindo drone, Wurmser suggested in a memo dated Jun 22 a retaliatory attack “on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies.” Judging by Bolton’s well-known aggressive stance on Iran, however, he probably did not require much convincing from Wurmser to go after Tehran with both guns blazing.
The revelation that Wurmser was feeding Bolton advice sheds a much-needed light, albeit an opaque one, on Trump’s inexplicable decision in early January to “take out” Gen Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the IRGC Quds Force. That high-risk move, carried out on the territory of Iraq, prompted Tehran to respond days later with calibrated strikes on two Pindo military bases inside of Iraq. Today, the situation remains volatile as rhetoric between the two sides has replaced outright violence, at least for the time being. Now the question: what could have compelled Trump to place any trust in Wurmser, whose resume reads like that of a bull in a china shop? One possibility is that Trump had no idea Wurmser was feeding Bolton and other members of his administration what amounted to yet more regime change shenanigans in the Middle East. This seems plausible considering the contradictory messages the White House was sending immediately following Soleimani’s cold-blooded murder. Pompeo, for example, claimed that Pindostan had specific information on “imminent attacks against Pindo facilities, including Pindo embassies, military bases.” Trump didn’t sound any more confident with regards to the “imminent threat” of an Iranian attack when he told Fox News, “probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad.” Sec Def Esper admitted regarding the evidence:
I didn’t see any, with regard to four embassies.
Esper eventually came around to saying that he “shared the president’s view” of an imminent attack from Iran. It seems plausible that the Trump administration could not get its story straight on where the information about Iran and an “imminent attack” had originated, because admitting it had derived from ‘the swamp’ would not have sat well with their voters. That is certainly no small consideration in an election year. When Trump hired John Bolton as his NSA in Mar 2018, he wasn’t just opening the corridors of power to the notorious hawk, as he may have imagined. Trump opened the door to all of Bolton’s former colleagues and confidants who share Bolton’s dangerous obsession with going to war with Iran. It is worth pondering whether Trump was compelled to hire Bolton because he understands he is not at liberty to abandon ‘the swamp’ as it simply wields too much power in Faschingstein.
What is more likely is that Trump overestimated himself, believing that he was smart enough to stay one step ahead of Bolton and his swamp contacts, like shadowy insider Wurmser, who in 1996 co-authored another report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm specifically for incoming Israeli PM Netanyahu, the paper promoted the idea of preemptive strikes against Iran and Syria. So why did Trump even assume the risk of being wrong? Why not bring in some fresh red-blooded conservative policy-makers who genuinely want to see Pindo troops extracted from quagmires around the MENA? Why all this talk about draining the swamp when the worst of the swamp creatures are awarded such powerful positions? Perhaps Trump imagined that Bolton’s mustachioed scowl would be enough to bring enemies to the negotiating table, gaining “leverage” before confronting your opponents, as Trump advised in ‘Art of the Deal.’
Whatever the case may be, Trump seriously underestimates the fact that there are people out there, the John Boltons and David Wurmsers of the world, who are not looking for the deal of the century. These people have spent their entire careers lobbying for military confrontation and regime change, as Gen Wesley Clark revealed with the “seven countries in five years” plan. They will pull any trick in the book to get their wars, and all of the lucrative defense contracts that follow. Although Trump may have squeaked by without full-blown military confrontation in places like North Korea, Syria and Venezuela so far, sooner or later he may get a bad roll of the dice. In fact, he may already have gambled wrongly with the warmongers he allowed into his administration, thereby setting Iran and Pindostan on a deadly crash course, and possibly the world. In that case, Trump will have nobody to blame but himself.
