“I’ve already delivered the message to Iran. They know not to do anything.” – “President” Biden
As readers will know I don’t take a lot of notice of the MSM, but the following roundtable discussion on the venerable American Sunday current affairs show, Face The Nation, did get attention from the non-MSM world because of this one contribution from long-time reporter, Catherine Herridge.
“Well, mine’s a little dark. I just feel a lot of concern that 2024 may be the year of a black swan event….[a] national security event with high impact [is] very hard to predict…. Not only this sort of enduring, heightened threat level, that we’re facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine…And we’re so divided in this country in ways that we haven’t seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea, China, and Iran. And that’s what concerns me most.”
People noted that she’s married to a military man and although their pillow talk is likely compartmentalised (for the sake of both their careers) their could be enough hints based on their respective areas of knowledge that there’s more to this than just idle talk.
Two days ago, Biden told reporters “I’ve already delivered the message to Iran. They know not to do anything.”
In what is a massive escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, Iran reportedly bombed a U.S. consulate in Northern Iraq on Monday.
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What makes this so unique compared to past attacks is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken direct credit for the attack. Normally, you’d see these kinds of assaults carried about by Iranian-backed proxy militias, and Iran itself would be careful to not be caught with its hand on the button. In this case, the IRGC isn’t leaving anything to the imagination, saying they were targeting “headquarters of spies” while striking at “anti-Iranian terrorist gatherings.”
Is this really a Black Swan event though? Tensions between Iran and America have been slowly ratcheting up for months now, despite the Biden Administrations best, naive intentions to cool them down. There have been many reports of Iran getting ever closer to building an atomic bomb:
A March 2023 assessment report by the Institute for Science and International Security indicated that Iran could enrich enough weapons-grade uranium (90% uranium-235) for one nuclear weapon in 12 days. In mid-November, the Institute assessed Iran was capable of making enough weapons-grade uranium “for six nuclear weapons in one month, eight in two months, ten in three months, eleven in four months, and twelve in five months.”
And of course the Israel-Hamas war ramped things up, including the Iranians using their proxy force of Houthis in Yemen to attack shipping – and getting hit back by the USA in the process. So far so (relatively) normal.
But this is so blatant, especially with Iran not hiding their responsibility, although even here are signs that this is an incremental escalation; after all, they could have hit the US Embassy in Iraq.
Even so, technically this is an act of war, but I can’t seen Biden being willing to expand it. For once I could agree with him; this smells of a deliberate strategy to pull the USA further and further out over the brink – with Iran, Russia and China all waiting to take advantage for their own purposes.
No Minister 