Anna Dravid. Interested and observant of Geopolitics, Culture, Politics and Global Trade for the last 3 decades. My comments are personal and my own views.
INDIA
Joined August 2023
- Tweets4.9K
- Following97
- Followers167
- Likes4.6K
Anna retweeted
Trump is reportedly contemplating using nuclear weapons against Iran's facilities. This is exactly and precisely where all those who advocated withdrawing from the JCPOA, and then "maximum pressure," wanted him to be.
Trace the timeline. First, they claimed the JCPOA was a bad deal that needed fixing. Remember the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' motto, "fix it or nix it"? Then they lured him out of the agreement by insisting it could not be fixed. Then they lobbied for the most extreme economic measures imaginable under maximum pressure. Then the narrative quietly shifted: economic pressure alone would not work, they said, and diplomacy with Iran required a "credible threat of military force." Just short of calling for war.
Once the use of force was normalized, they set about getting him to actually use it. Report after report argued that designating Iran's official armed forces, the IRGC, as a terrorist organization, and then assassinating Iran's top general, would make Tehran cave. It didn't. But the ice had been broken. From then on, every step was an escalation, and every diplomatic initiative that might have eased tensions or produced a peaceful settlement was attacked and buried.
Then came the strike on Fordow, alongside Israel. Then the war in February, in which they got him to cross every red line and pushed a settlement further out of reach than ever.
Running in parallel all these years was a campaign to persuade Washington that diplomacy with Iran is a waste of time and that the only option worth keeping on the table is the military one. Iran is just "buying time," they said. Iran never honors its commitments, they said, even as IAEA inspectors verified its compliance over and over. You can't negotiate with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran cannot be trusted. Iran is weak. Why bother negotiate with a “significantly weakened Iran” when you can simply use force to extract concessions?
So much for "weak"!
Every one of these assumptions has proved false. Yet instead of asking why they were wrong at every turn, they read each failure as proof that the last measure was too mild.
And so here we are. Openly discussing war crimes, threatening to wipe out power plants and bridges, bombing civilian infrastructure and even weighing nuclear weapons have all become ordinary instruments of policy.
They took a president who brandished "The Art of the Deal" and sold himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and turned him into a man deciding whether to become the first leader since Truman to use a nuclear weapon. Against whom? A country that was already at the negotiating table, prepared to reach an equitable agreement.
So don't let them ever claim this was about a bad nuclear deal that needed correcting. It was always about Israel's destructive agenda, carried into Washington by its lobbies, its mouthpieces and its PR firms.
There is an old fable about a frog dropped into a pot of water that is heated so slowly it never thinks to jump. Each degree feels bearable, because it is only one degree warmer than the last. The frog never notices the moment the water starts to boil. Washington is that frog. And the water is already boiling.
Anna retweeted
Tucker Carlson reports that Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing Donald Trump to launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Before that idea gains any ground in Washington, its consequences need to be understood. More than 180 countries renounced nuclear weapons under a set of explicit promises. A nuclear attack on Iran would show those promises to be worthless.
The bargain is written into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty itself. Under Article II, non-nuclear-weapon states agreed not to acquire nuclear arms. In return, they were promised three things: the inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy, good-faith negotiations toward disarmament by the nuclear powers, and - when the treaty was extended indefinitely - assurances that nuclear weapons would not be used against them, noted by the Security Council in Resolution 984. In Iran’s case, the first promise has already been broken: its peaceful programme has been sanctioned and bombed. The second has gone unmet for decades. A nuclear strike would break the third.
The regime urging this strike has never accepted any part of that bargain. Israel refuses to join the NPT, has never acknowledged the arsenal it built at Dimona, and has ignored Security Council Resolution 487 calling on it to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. When Mordechai Vanunu exposed the programme, Israeli agents abducted him in Rome and he spent 18 years in prison. Under the Begin Doctrine, Israel claims the right to bomb any state in the region it suspects of seeking the capability it already possesses, while demanding total transparency from its neighbours and accepting none for itself. At the same time, Israel stands accused of genocide and of widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity. Its forces have repeatedly violated the sovereignty of neighbouring states through cross-border strikes and occupations, and it has pursued an openly aggressive posture across the region. Its prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court. This is the war criminal now urging Washington to use the most destructive weapon ever built against a member of the treaty his regime has spent half a century evading.
Iran’s record points the other way. It negotiated the JCPOA, which the Security Council endorsed unanimously in Resolution 2231, and the IAEA confirmed its compliance in report after report. Washington walked away anyway. When Iran returned to the table, it was attacked twice: days before a scheduled round with U.S. envoys, and hours after talks in Geneva that Oman’s foreign minister said had brought the two sides close to a genuine agreement.
Article X allows any party to withdraw if extraordinary events related to the treaty have jeopardised its supreme interests. A nuclear attack on a member that negotiated, complied, and kept returning to diplomacy would hand that argument to every other member. Islamic countries will rightly see an ethno-supremacist and racist ideology behind this use of nuclear weapons. A nuclear strike against a Muslim-majority nation, urged by a regime that has long defined itself in ethno-religious terms and that has never accepted the restraints of the NPT, would be read not as a narrow security measure but as the expression of a deeper hierarchy of peoples. That perception would further erode confidence in the treaty among its Islamic members and accelerate momentum toward withdrawal. The treaty rests on a single premise: that a state can give up the bomb and still be safe. If that premise fails in Iran, parliaments, politicians, and publics across the membership will start asking whether staying in serves their security. Some governments will decide that it does not. Withdrawals, individual or collective, would follow, and the non-proliferation regime would simply not survive them.
@TuckerCarlson
Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” says an informed observer.
Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last week’s election results, he can’t form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war.
To that end, he’s applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahu’s lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha.
The rest of America’s longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They won’t recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people.
And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.
We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called “battlefield nukes” easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it.
Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, he’s hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.
They’re right, though it won’t be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances, and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making.
One group that hasn’t been consulted so far is the global population — the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.
Anna retweeted
I swear no one trolls Trump as hard as the Iranians 😂
Yes, that is a living billboard of him in JAIL in the heart of Tehran
Anna retweeted
"Allahu Akbar" has been said at the bedsides of dying parents.
At the birth of children.
At the moment of surviving something unsurvivable.
It means "God is great."
It is said billions of times a day by people making tea, driving to work, watching their children sleep.
Then one man says it before he kills someone, and suddenly it belongs to the violence.
"God Bless America" has been said over every war the United States has launched since 1945.
Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Yemen. Iran.
Said from podiums by men who had already signed the orders.
Said in the same breath as the casualty projections.
One phrase gets blamed for its worst day.
The other gets absolved of its daily use.
That asymmetry is not an accident.
That asymmetry is a policy.
Anna retweeted
They will tell you Islam has a violence problem.
They will tell you this with a straight face in a civilization that invented the atomic bomb, used it on civilian cities twice, built enough nuclear warheads to end human life on earth seventeen times over, and has been in a continuous state of military conflict somewhere on the planet for the entirety of the modern era.
The violence problem argument requires a very specific form of selective vision.
It requires you to see the violence of the powerless as ideology and the violence of the powerful as policy.
It requires you to see a man with a knife as a cultural symptom and a man with an aircraft carrier as a strategic asset.
It requires you to read the Quran for verses that justify violence and to not read the history of Western colonialism for the same.
That selective vision was not an accident.
It was curated.
By the people who needed the threat to come from somewhere else.
Anna retweeted
National security is just a flimsy excuse. Reminds me of the Pegasus software.
The real point is allowing Ambani and Jio to establish a complete monopoly over the Indian telecomm business, so that no other company can claim a share of the market.
We all know how the domestic psu company BSNL has been reduced to.
As long as Modi is in power, Starlink won't be able to do business in India.
Let that sink in.
Anna retweeted
It only took 4 weeks for Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to send fighter jets and soldiers to Yemen.
After 4 years of genocide in Gaza, they sent NOTHING.
Anna retweeted
China laying bare the brutal facts:
Donald Trump:
"It is costing us $2 billion a day to reopen the Strait of Hormuz"
China's Foreign Minister:
"The Strait was open before the war. The root of the problem lies in your illegal operations against Iran; you created a global crisis out of nothing"
Anna retweeted
It’s not China they fear.
It’s what China disproves.
That a nation can rise without plunder.
That poverty can fall without war.
That growth doesn’t need Wall Street permission slips.
That a billion people can be fed, housed, and educated without invading anyone.
That is what terrifies the empire.
Not tyranny.
But competence.
Anna retweeted
Pentagon Cites "Security Concerns" to Pull ALL 12 B-1 Bombers From RAF Fairford
Was the alleged Iran FALSE FLAG used to justify the U.S. bomber exit?
The incident was quickly BLAMED ON IRAN despite NO explosives being found, NO charges being filed and all 6 suspects being released on bail. Signs instead point to FUEL THEFT.
Iran calls it a FALSE FLAG meant to manufacture an Iranian threat. And now, conveniently, that same "threat" gives Washington cover to pull its bombers without looking WEAK.
Anna retweeted
They have a word for what happens when a foreign power enters your country, removes your government, installs a compliant replacement, opens your markets to foreign capital, and leaves your population with the debt:
They call it "liberation."
You are expected to be grateful.
If you are not grateful, you are "radicalized."
If you resist, you are a "terrorist."
The vocabulary was designed so that every possible response to what was done to you confirms the story they told about why they came.
Anna retweeted
If it’s true that Iran has threatened US interests worldwide, it might be instructive, Mr. Secretary, why they would so threaten us.
Might it, I don’t know, have something to do with the fact we started two wars with them in the span of one year without justification, assassinated there leader — including his granddaughter — blew up a school killing hundreds of little girls and teachers, and threatened to annihilate their civilization?
Do you think those might be at least potential factors? No, I’m sure u don’t think so. There’s only nefarious intent and evidence of wickedness of the Iranian side, and no justification for doing anything to us — or at least that’s the way you would like it to be.
You want the freedom to assassinate and kill everyone you want in their country, and there b literally no pushback from them.
You may want that, but that’s not how the real world works, and by pushing down that road, you put all of *us* at unnecessary risk as well, and the well-being of our country. That’s something you and President Trump caused.
Anna retweeted
Give it a few days and it’ll become apparent that these were fuel thieves who were stealing diesel from farms in huge barrels in vans (explosive, not explosives… hence not viable). Who just were literally in the wrong place at the wrong time. A not uncommon crime in rural Gloucestershire.
news.sky.com/share/13527288
Anna retweeted
After the Gaza genocide, it’s clear the United Nations represent little more than a forum for w(h)ining and dining on the international stage.
It’s where world leaders come to embrace Trump with hope the U.S. media embrace them. It’s where Al-Qaeda receives a warm reception in NYC. It’s where we hear the same blah, blah, blah every year.
Then of course, this is the same organization that established itself as the guarantor of territorial independence and national sovereignty, only to swiftly turn around and use its mandate to establish the planetary cancer known as Israel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anna retweeted
From Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian's speech at the UN General Assembly:
——
• “Either we will build security together, or we will endure insecurity together.”
• “We do not ask permission from anyone to defend our country.”
• “We cannot speak of peace while ignoring Palestine. Lasting peace in West Asia will not last without justice for Palestine.”
• “Iran has learned one truth clearly in its long history: the world without power is dangerous, but a world that only understands the language of power will not have sustainable security.”
• “The nuclear bomb is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran. Israel kills, but Iran is sanctioned. This is a tragedy; if you tell this to anyone, they will laugh. It kills, and we are sanctioned.”
• “Let [Trump] know that threats make our nation more united and stronger, and increase the resistance of Iranians. They must know that the nation of Iran will not bow its head before force, and it will make the aggressors regret it. This is what Trump and those who want to bully must understand.”
• “We are ready for dialogue, but let them know that we will not accept the language of force.”
Anna retweeted
Donald Trump’s maniacal rant before the UN General Assembly today, complete with ridiculous braggadocio, narcissistic puffery, an almost unbroken line of absurd, demonstrable lies, open criminality, and deranged, murderous threats, should awaken even the most cowardly and complicit among world leaders that their attempts at appeasement of Trump and the tyrannical Axis that he leads can only result in further aggression, economic terrorism, murder, and genocide. The world must unite to counter the threat and to defend peace, human rights, and the rule of law, which are, after all, declared purposes of the UN.
