It's very possible that we will soon be talking about the Iran crisis. After the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis and the refugee crisis, it could mark the next milestone of Angela Merkel's chancellorship. Yet again, Germany and Europe could be stumbling into a crisis that is eminently predictable. After the refugee crisis, Merkel said herself that a policy of "looking away" was wrong. We should have realized what was happening and done something about it early on. 

It's no different with Iran. The country is restless. People have been taking to the streets to vent their daily dissatisfaction for months. The last time the regime was under this much pressure was in the days of the Green Movement in 2009. This time, however, the dissatisfaction is neither restricted to one political movement, nor to Tehran. In many Iranian provinces, people are rising up to protest water shortages, bread prices, unemployment and nepotism. They protest with anger and distress. Crippling inflation is sending food prices soaring as the currency collapses. Iran's economic crisis is rooted in both domestic and international problems a result on the one hand of mismanagement and corruption but also of years of sanctions and isolation.

Read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/editorial-what-if-iran-becomes...

Yes, of course the West wants to squeeze as much juice as it can from Iran. The hairy lemon squeezer is out... The Europeans were happy, the Iranians were happy, all doing business that was going fine until the hairy-Bigfoot president from the other side of the Potomac came along to reminds them that peace is not a profit-making venture. 

So we're going to stuff up Iran, now that we've stuffed up Libya, Syria and the rest. Meanwhile some countries still don't wan't to hear the message of warmongering and will fill the cracks. 

So, the wolf with the yellow coiffe will huff and puff like a president...

American politicians provoke a slew of emotions, from tears of rage to tears of laughter. But perhaps the uppermost emotion is one of pity.

With a few honorable exceptions, it is such a pity that the American people are misled by such buffoons. It is such a pity that the American and Russian people — who have so much in common as human beings — are nevertheless being driven towards a state of war by these buffoonish politicians.

Senator Rand Paul, like his father Ron, is an honorable exception.

Paul was in Russia last week offering a hand of peace and dialogue.

Back home, however, the Congress is dominated by Democrat and Republican war-makers, not lawmakers, who harbor such irrational bitterness towards Russia. They are clamoring for war with their ludicrous sanctions against Moscow.

READ MORE: US Establishment Push Sanctions to Derail Paul’s Mission to Russia — Ex-Diplomat

Frankly, the United States does not have a government. It is a regime.

What else can we call it when the interests and needs of the vast majority of the nation are not served. A president, Donald Trump, was elected in part because he pledged to normalize relations with Russia.

But instead the political elites and unelected powers-that-be over-ride the popular mandate, to impose their agenda of belligerence.

So much for democracy!

Rather what is being served is the war-profiting of a corporatist state by a national tiny minority of ignorant and hate-filled politicians who are bought and paid for.

The American regime is implementing more economic sanctions on Russia based on absurd fantasies. The fantasy that Russia carried out a poison-assassination in Britain; the fantasy that Russia interferes in the US elections; the fantasy that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a "Hitler figure" who also controls the US president; the fantasy that Russian news media, like Sputnik and RT, are part of a fiendish Kremlin plot to subvert American society.

READ MORE: US Imposing Sanctions on Russia Over Skripal Poisoning — State Department

How is it possible to conduct a civilized dialogue with such delusional, paranoid people?

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201808121067138050-russia-us-war-peace/

...

In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington advised his countrymen to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

“The vast majority of America’s landowning aristocracy,” writes Bruce Porter in War and the Rise of the State, “had an almost congenital distrust of standing armies, which their ancestors for generations had identified with despotism.”

Physician Benjamin Rush, a civic leader in Philadelphia and signer of the Declaration of Independence, suggested a series of slogans to be “placed over the door of the War Office,” including “An office for butchering the human species” and “A Widow and Orphan making office.”

After the American Civil War, attention shifted toward remembering those who fought in that conflict. But this, too, engendered vehement opposition. For example, Montgomery quotes William Dean Howells, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866, and decrying the national urge to raise “a much greater standing army in bronze and marble than would have been needed for the suppression of any future rebellion.” Howells worried that a proliferation of war memorials would “misrepresent us and our age to posterity; for we are not a military people, (though we certainly know how to fight upon occasion).”

But the character of the American people seems to have changed since then. Judging from the war memorials now adorning the National Mall, and those planned, we are a military people, and our constant wars are disrupted only by brief occasions of peace.

***

What is the solution? How can we redirect the nation’s energy away from distant wars that years from now will require memorials to honor those killed in them?

Some argued that conscripting all 18-year old men, and now women, into the military, or at least subjecting some portion of that age cohort to the prospect of involuntary service, as was done during Korea and Vietnam, would force the public to confront the costs of the nation’s wars. It might even, we are told, cause us to fight fewer of them, or fight them for a shorter period of time.

But I think that the memorials already built, and those under consideration, tell a different story. It is certainly true that the public today is generally unaware of the sacrifices that a small fraction of the population endures in war. The mere possibility that one’s son or daughter, or brother or sister, or even their next-door neighbor, might come home in a flag-draped coffin could arouse Americans to care more. But is that what has happened?

...

Near the end of the fifth episode in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War” series, we learn that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had grave concerns about the U.S. war in Vietnam by late 1967. In a secret memo to President Lyndon Johnson, he urged a halt to bombing, a freeze on American troop levels, and renewed negotiations. There is no “reason to believe,” McNamara wrote, “that the steady progress we are likely to make, the continued infliction of grievous casualties, or the heavy punishment of air bombardment will suffice to break the will of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong to continue to fight.” Separately he stated his “belief that continuation of our present action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.”

Had the troop levels come down then, there would be far fewer names carved in black granite in that wall on the National Mall. Instead, McNamara kept his doubts concealed from public view. LBJ secured him a comfortable job as president of the World Bank. And the casualty rolls from Vietnam only grew longer. The names can now be found on Panels 33E through W1 on the wall.

Perhaps our memorials should honor those killed in distant lands, but also recall the policies and people that put them in those places? Perhaps we should acknowledge those who had the courage, or the wisdom, to end the wars once it was obvious that the costs outweighed the benefits? I’d support some sort of formal recognition for those who eventually pulled U.S. troops out of Korengal. Maybe a plaque somewhere?

Meanwhile, perhaps those still living, who were responsible for the names carved in smooth stone, should be tasked with tending these memorials, much as common criminals are put to work picking up trash along the highways.

Better yet, perhaps we should recognize those who keep the country out of unnecessary wars altogether. Alas, they left no memorials to tend.

Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Read more:

https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/remembrance-of-war-as-warning/

Read from top and read:

https://www.corbettreport.com/federalreserve/