THE GEOPOLITICAL THEOREM: US bosses are pro-jihad and anti-Israel (Part 2)
The Geopolitical Theorem -- An MOR series
If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, you may do so here:
Theorem
Once the premises are agreed, a THEOREM is any statement logically deduced from them—inescapably true, because inspection compels agreement.
In Part 1 we defined two competing models of geopolitics.
MAINSTREAM MODEL. The US bosses are enemies of jihadism and best allies of Israel, committed to the protection and defense of Israel as a top foreign-policy priority.
MOR MODEL. The US bosses are covert totalitarian antisemites, working to produce, by proxy, a jihadi genocide of the Jewish people in the State of Israel.
Specific to Iranian jihadism—the crown jewel in the genocidal, antisemitic system—the MOR model claims that triggering a US attack on the Iranian jihadis will be quite difficult. Or put it this way:
MOR PREDICTION. Even under extreme Iranian provocation, the US bosses will try hard to protect Iran from a US and/or Israeli attack.
The rival mainstream model neatly makes a precisely opposite prediction.
MAINSTREAM PREDICTION. Provoking the passionately pro-Israel US bosses to attack Iran will be easier than with any other country.
I will here wield this prediction of the mainstream model in order to construct what I claim is a geopolitical theorem: an argument that logically compels agreement.
My theorem compels agreement with the following statement:
The mainstream model is false.
I operationalize, for rigor
The mainstream prediction again:
MAINSTREAM PREDICTION. It will be easier to provoke the US bosses to attack Iran than to attack any other country.
I will subject this prediction to a rigorous historical test.
Now, since this test turns on what counts as ‘easier,’ a relative concept, we need to drop anchor in objective and empirical bedrock or else be cast adrift in a sea of subjective uncertainty.
But can the meaning of ‘easier’ really be given a material expression that is specific and concrete? Happily, yes, by operationalizing the variable ‘intensity of provocation of the US bosses’ on the quantitative dimension: ‘US citizens killed.’
We drop anchor, then, with the following question:
Assuming the US bosses want regime change in a country not threatening Israel, how many US citizens must that country kill—at a minimum—to provoke the US bosses into a regime-change intervention?
This question is empirical—we answer it by consulting the historical record.
Take Panama. In 1989, Panama was in no way threatening the State of Israel. But the US bosses were nevertheless sufficiently provoked to engineer regime change in Panama. What provoked them?
One dead US soldier.
Mind you, Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian boss, had not attacked the US or anything remotely like it. This was a low-level roadblock incident that resulted in one—just one—dead US soldier.
Do you need a metaphor? Uncle Sam is a psycho gangster—the Godfather. Twitch out of turn and he’ll cut you to pieces. That’s what happened to Noriega.
This is our benchmark.
Expressed as a number instead of a metaphor, our historically validated quantitative anchor is this: when the US bosses want regime change in a country that is not threatening Israel, one US citizen killed is sufficient provocation.
Thus numerically anchored, we may now proceed to logic. We ask:
On the mainstream model: Given that one US citizen killed provoked the US bosses into regime change in Panama, a country that was not threatening Israel, how many US citizens must jihadi Iran kill to provoke Uncle Sam into regime change there?
The answer is mathematical: negative US citizens.
Another way of saying that is: even before Iran kills any US citizens, Uncle Sam is already provoked. Hence, under the mainstream model, Uncle Sam may proceed to regime change in Iran at any time—further Iranian provocations are entirely superfluous.
Yet further provocations there have been—galore.
The 1983 Iranian terrorist attack in Lebanon
It would be tiresome to list all of Iran’s provocations. But it is also unnecessary. One dramatic Iranian provocation will suffice:
“[T]he 1983 campaign of terrorist actions against US targets in Lebanon. (…) Seventeen Americans were killed [from a total of 63 dead] in the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut April 8 1983. The attack on the Marine compound at Beirut International Airport came six months later. Early on October 23, 1983, a truck carrying about 2000 pounds of explosives wired to tanks of propane gas erupted in a blast that demolished the four-story main building and left a crater 40 feet deep and 30 feet wide. Dozens of young Marines were killed instantly in their bunks. Many more were buried under the rubble.”1
Total US Marines killed: 241.
In addition, 58 French paratroopers were killed in a nearly simultaneous attack on the French barracks in Beirut.
The terrorists behind all this—who would soon call themselves Hezbollah—had been organized and paid by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Now, 241 US Marines + 17 US diplomats = 258 US citizens killed. So this Iranian provocation was exactly 258 times bigger—almost two-and-a-half orders of magnitude bigger!—than Panama’s.
But that dry number—without the added context of cultural meaning—cannot convey just what outrageous overkill this provocation was. The attack on the Marine barracks was the deadliest single-day loss for the US Marines since the famous WWII Battle of Iwo Jima, where one out of every three attacking Marines was lost. Iranian jihadism dealt the United States a spectacular historical humiliation.
And for additional context, it is worth pondering this: the Iranian terrorist attack of 1983 was the deadliest terrorist attack suffered by the United States until that date.
If you are not feeling this in your stomach, then perhaps you lost hold of our metaphor.
The Panama case establishes that Uncle Sam is The Godfather. Il Padrino. Twitch and he’ll cut you down. Khomeini prances in, all hip hop and a-swagger, and brags that he’ll rape Uncle Sam’s darling niece Israel. Calls her a ho. Then he lifts his gown and rubs his groin on the Godfather’s face!
What does the mainstream model expect? Ayatollah annihilation. But this is what happened: nothing.
Actually, less than nothing.
Not only did Reagan not retaliate; four months after the attack, he withdrew all US forces from Lebanon, leaving it to Hezbollah. ‘When Reagan Cut and Run,’ is how the title of a Foreign Policy piece remembers it (the author, an Orwellian master, explains it without sarcasm as bold leadership).2
And it gets worse…
It was later found that the National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted communications about these attacks before they happened. In a Miami Herald piece titled ‘U.S. knew Iran ordered, funded Beirut bombings, intercepts show,’ Jim McGee wrote:
“It is not clear how long before the attacks the communications were intercepted, or why the NSA intercepts were not used to warn American personnel [in Beirut].”3
McGee seemed deeply troubled by all this.
He was writing—mind you—right after the Iran-Contra scandal had broken. This scandal was making everybody reel backwards in just… total disbelief. I have tried to convey the total shock of heartbroken Americans (and others) here:
You have to try to picture this (I lived through it—it was amazing): Ronald Reagan—the hero/president, the Savior of the West, Defeater of the [Soviet] Evil Empire, the Macho Patriot and Greatest American Ever, and, in particular, the John Waynesque nemesis of the terrorist ayatollahs—had been sending, in secret, billions of dollars in weapons to the selfsame ayatollahs.
What could explain this?
Reagan claimed with a straight face—he was a great actor—that the secret weapons were supposedly ransom payments to Khomeini in exchange for the lives of Hezbollah-held hostages in Lebanon. Editors in all major newsrooms obviously directed their minions not to challenge this nonsensical ‘arms for hostages’ story, but McGee resisted: his obeisance was buried and so oblique that only a careful and expert reader could spot it.4 Meanwhile, his own skeptical outrage was only thinly veiled in his opening sentence, which reads:
“Two years before Marine Lt. Co. Oliver North arranged shipments of arms to Iran, the White House had precise evidence that Iran paid for the terrorist bombings in Beirut that killed 258 US servicemen and diplomats.”5
For his readers in 1986, this explosive sentence—given pride of place in McGee’s opening—required only minimal interpretation.
The Iran-Contra Scandal had just broken in 1986, and it was still believed then that the secret weapons transfers to Khomeini in Iran had begun the year before, in 1985. What McGee pointed out was that “two years before” that, in 1983, the White House already knew that the Iranian ayatollahs had ordered the Hezbollah terrorist attack of the same year—the one that “killed 258 servicemen and diplomats.” The implicit question McGee left hanging:
How could Reagan-Bush knowingly arm the authors of what—at the time—was the biggest-ever terrorist attack against US citizens?
But it’s even worse. Because it turns out that you cannot reply to this implicit question with: “Well, yes, but Reagan-Bush were very worried about the Hezbollah-held hostages in Lebanon, so they tried to save them.” This answer doesn’t make any logical sense if you assume the US bosses actually care about US citizens, because the ayatollahs had already killed 258 US citizens; the hostages in Lebanon were just a handful.
But in any case, it was later shown that the Iran-Contra secret weapons transfers had begun flowing in 1981, before any Hezbollah-held hostages existed in Lebanon. What follows, as we have documented and explained, is that the secret weapons for Khomeini had absolutely nothing to do with freeing US citizens held hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon:
And keep your eye on this ball:
The Iranian terrorist attack of 1983 happened smack in the middle of the Iran-Contra weapons transfers—weapons transfers that just kept on going.
How much did they send? According to the New York Times, “several billion dollars [in armament] flowed to Iran each year during the early 1980’s.”6
This is a natural test
Let us summarize the evidence.
First, one US citizen killed was sufficient provocation for the US bosses to intervene and produce regime change in Panama—a country that was not threatening Israel, that did not want to destroy Israel in genocide. That’s our benchmark.
The Iranian ayatollahs do want to destroy Israel in genocide. Yet the US bosses began arming the ayatollahs in secret. Then they got wind that a terrorist attack was coming against US citizens in Lebanon. They did nothing to warn or protect those US citizens.
That terrorist attack murdered 258 US citizens—a provocation exactly 258 times larger than Panama’s. This was at the time, as we said, the deadliest terrorist attack ever suffered by the United States. And also the highest number of US Marines killed in a single day since Iwo Jima.
The US bosses knew the author was Iran. Yet instead of getting 258 times the pain that Panama got, the Iranian ayatollahs got what they wanted. No retaliation from the United States. An evacuation of US forces from Lebanon, which they could now transform, via Hezbollah, into a terror State aimed at Israel. And they got lots more secret US weapons.
So that’s the evidence. We had two predictions:
MAINSTREAM PREDICTION. Provoking the passionately pro-Israel US bosses to attack Iran will be easier than with any other country.
MOR PREDICTION. Even under extreme Iranian provocation, the pro-jihad US bosses will try hard to protect Iran from a US and/or Israeli attack.
Reagan-Bush’s behavior matches the MOR prediction rather precisely.
The mainstream model, by contrast, must declare what happened here impossible. Yet it happened. Ergo, the mainstream model has been obliterated.
This is a definitive test. The mainstream model is false. QED.
You can’t fight meaning
It is not merely a question of the structure of the Universe, but of meaning.
If you say that the US bosses
are enemies of jihadism;
are best allies of Israel; and
make of Israel’s security a top foreign-policy priority
and also say that, after the most outrageous terrorist attack ever on the US, by the very jihadi ayatollahs who promise to destroy the US and Israel, the US bosses can
sit still and not retaliate;
leave Lebanon for the jihadi ayatollahs to control and transform into a terrorist base to destroy Israel; and
continue to arm in secret the selfsame ayatollahs to the teeth,
then the words ‘enemy,’ ‘ally’ and ‘priority’ have lost all meaning. It’s like saying that one man can literally plunge a kitchen knife—with intent to kill—into another man’s back, and yet you can still call the knife-wielder the other guy’s ‘best ally.’ Whoever talks like that semantically self-annihilates (existentially, too, for they can’t recognize enemies).
At this point you are ‘not even wrong’ (as Wolfgang Pauli would say), because in order to be wrong you need to be saying something. This is nothing.
The same thing happens when people say: “Oh well, the US bosses did Iran-Contra because they have their own interests. But they are still the best ally of Israel.” Nope. Sorry. If their own interests—whatever they are—lead the US bosses to refrain from retaliating when under massive attack just so they can continue arming that attacker—Israel’s genocidal enemy!—to the teeth, then those interests have made the US bosses the worst enemy of Israel. To claim otherwise is, once again, to annul the meanings of ‘ally,’ ‘enemy,’ and ‘priority.’
Loss of meaning is catastrophic. If your ‘words’ are just nonsensical strings of letters, empty containers, you may be mouthing but you are not speaking. And that’s a lot worse than just having a bad model.
In sum, to avoid semantic annihilation—to be saying something as opposed to saying nothing—the mainstream model must logically and forthrightly declare the events of Iran-Contra impossible. When the mainstream model does that, it is at least good enough to be wrong. But then it’s still wrong—because Iran-Contra did happen, and the arms transfers continued despite maximal Iranian provocation.
Iran-Contra is therefore an example of what I call a dramatic fact.
The dramatic fact
A dramatic fact is one that, all by itself, without the support of additional evidence, suffices entirely to falsify (refute) the hypothesis you were considering. Why? Because the hypothesis requires that very fact to be not merely unlikely, but impossible. And yet there it is: indisputably documented. You are done: hypothesis falsified.
This is not the same as a failed prediction. So allow me to distinguish the two things, and then I’ll come back to the US and Iran.
An example of a failed prediction is when astronomers got the wrong orbit for Uranus. This was surprising because Newton’s model of gravity had been working so well that astronomers had adopted Newton as ground truth. But Newton’s laws got Uranus wrong: failed prediction. Yet astronomers did not say: Well, guess that’s it for Newton’s model of gravity—it’s no good, after all! Why not? Because Newton’s model had successfully predicted the trajectories of all kinds of bodies.
Astronomers said to themselves: Newton must be right. There must be some unknown nearby object that is pulling on Uranus. Assuming thus that Newton was right, they solved his equations for the properties of the mystery object that—in a Newtonian Universe—would have to exist in order for Uranus to have an orbit like that. Equipped with the solution, they trained their telescopes and… sure enough: there was Neptune!
Notice: the astronomers initially made a Newtonian prediction and failed. But the prediction failed because they were missing some information, not because of a fundamental problem with Newton’s model. The model didn’t fail; to the contrary, it succeeded perfectly. By assuming the model’s usefulness and solving Newton’s equations for the missing information, the astronomers found Neptune occupying the precise mass and vector that Newton’s model required.
What is the lesson? When the model is reasonably good—meaning that the model has been explaining and predicting successfully all manner of phenomena—a failed prediction is usually no danger to the model, but rather the first step in the model’s further extension.
To document a mere failed prediction, therefore, is not the same as documenting a dramatic—or diagnostic—fact.
The orbit of Mercury—now that was a dramatic fact. Why? Because Newton’s equations failed to predict it, and no nearby object could be found that would explain the orbit of Mercury in Newtonian terms. If no such object exists, then the orbit of Mercury is impossible in a Newtonian Universe. Yet there it is. Since it is, and since Newton’s model declares it impossible, Newton’s model has failed.
You are done.
That does not mean you already have an alternative model to account for everything that Newton gets right and also the orbit of Mercury. But you do know that you need it.
Does such an alternative model exist? Yes, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity can explain every single orbit that Newton can, and also the orbit of Mercury.
Does that mean that Newton’s model is useless? Not at all. Newton’s model is an excellent approximation for all manner of physical systems, so long as they are not too small, too heavy, or moving too fast.
But can’t we say the same thing about the mainstream model of geopolitics? Yes, granted, it requires something already documented to be impossible: Iran-Contra. But perhaps—like Newton—the mainstream model can still be practically useful?
Nope. The mainstream model getting Iran-Contra wrong is not analogous to Newton getting Mercury wrong. This is more like Newton getting, not just Mercury, but the entire Solar System wrong. And completely wrong, not just off by a little.
In other words, Iran-Contra—the US-sponsored launch of the modern World Jihad from Iran—is not an edge case. It is central. If your model not only doesn’t explain Iran-Contra, but was expecting at this scale, and for these key players, a completely opposite kind of behavior; if your model, saying it frankly, requires what happened here to be impossible, then it’s wrong. But not like Newton is wrong; in this case, the model is wrong and also useless.
But can’t we say that Donald Trump’s present attack on Iran is at least consistent with the mainstream model?
Sure, you can say that. And you can find other things consistent with the mainstream model. For example, the US sends some weapons to Israel. But since we already have a documented dramatic—diagnostic—fact, one that the mainstream model requires to be impossible, we are done. Sorry. That’s just logic.
The mainstream model is false.
And this means that any policy behaviors that—in isolation—might have been interpreted as the US bosses being allies of Israel must now be re-examined for their likely Machiavellian articulations in a broader pattern of attack against the Jewish State.
To make this point more forcefully, I will now briefly summarize US foreign policy in the Middle East over the last half century, paying attention to how the MOR model accounts for the evidence, and where the mainstream model fails to do the same. This will make clear that the mainstream model, when all is said and done, really explains nothing. And the MOR model? It explains everything.
(Yes, even Trump’s attack on Iran.)
McGee, J. (1986, December 7). U.S. knew Iran ordered, funded Beirut bombings, intercepts show. Miami Herald.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00587R000100200013-7.pdf
Zenko, M. (2014, February 7). When Reagan cut and run. Foreign Policy.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/02/07/when-reagan-cut-and-run/ (foreignpolicy.com)
McGee, J. (1986, December 7). U.S. knew Iran ordered, funded Beirut bombings, intercepts show. Miami Herald.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00587R000100200013-7.pdf
If you are here, you like to get into the weeds! I don’t blame you. I am the same way.
Okay, so in obeisance to the newsroom directive that one must accept Reagan-Bush’s ‘arms for hostages’ story, McGee wrote:
“the dramatic change in US policy toward Iran that took place in June 1985—after the Reagan administration realized that Iran had used its influence with Lebanese Shiite Moslems [Hezbollah] to free the Americans seized in the Trans Airlines hijacking.”
The “dramatic change in US policy that took place in June 1985” is a reference to Reagan sending arms to Khomeini. McGee writes “dramatic change in policy” because, on the strength of Reagan’s histrionic public performances, it was believed that Reagan’s earlier policy had been to oppose Iranian jihadism. And he says the “dramatic change … took place in June 1985” because, when he wrote that, in 1986, it was still believed that the secret weapons transfers to Khomeini had begun in 1985.
And McGee supplies the alleged reason for the alleged change in policy: Reagan-Bush wanted to save some American hostages, and they had noticed that Iran could order Hezbollah to release American hostages.
So you can piece what he is saying if you go over it more than once, and if you have all the context on your fingertips. The sentence is paying lip service to the official explanation. But let us be frank: his sentence is completely opaque and convoluted. McGee is hiding his genuflection to the official story.
McGee, J. (1986, December 7). U.S. knew Iran ordered, funded Beirut bombings, intercepts show. Miami Herald.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91-00587R000100200013-7.pdf
The Iran Pipeline: A Hidden Chapter/A special report.; U.S. Said to Have Allowed Israel to Sell Arms to Iran, The New York Times, December 8, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 1; Part 1; Page 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk, 2897 words, By SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Special to The New York Times, WASHINGTON, Dec. 7
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/iran-pipeline-hidden-chapter-special-report-us-said-have-allowed-israel-sell.html
Much as it pains me to even think this, would it be consistent with your model to posit that the Western Bosses allowed the State of Israel to come into existence as a "milk and honey trap" to lure as many Jews as possible, from as many countries as possible, into one small place and then...?