Trump, Iran and Epstein

As even the U.S. mainstream press is acknowledging, President Trump’s decision to wage a war of aggression on Iran appears to make no sense at all, especially when considers the array of alternating and shifting reasons that Trump has given to justify his decision to launch this war.

For example consider Trump’s claim that he just wants to help the Iranian people by freeing them from the tyranny of Iran’s brutal dictatorship.

That justification is patently ridiculous. The U.S. government has never shown any regard for the well-being of the Iranian people.

For example, go back in 1953, when the CIA engineered a coup that destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy and gave them the CIA-installed brutal dictatorship of the Shah.

Or consider the decades of brutal sanctions that the U.S. government has enforced against Iran, by which U.S. officials have intentionally targeted the Iranian people with severe economic privation in the hope that they would rise up in a violent revolution in which tens of thousands of them would lose their lives, oust their dictatorship, and replace it with another pro-U.S. dictatorship — like that of the Shah.

Or consider Trump’s plea right now to the Iranian people to rise up and take control over their government. He’s willing to sacrifice thousands of Iranian people in that endeavor rather than sacrifice the lives of U.S. troops in an invasion to achieve regime change. That’s because he knows that while American voters don’t give a hoot as to how many Iranians would die in this effort, they care mightily about how many American soldiers would die.

Or consider other dictatorships — e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia (don’t forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi), Jordan, Kuwait, and others. U.S. officials love them and support them because they are pro-U.S. dictatorships.

Indeed, the U.S. government right now is actually working with, maintaining, and partnering with a brutal unelected and illegitimate socialist-communist, narco-terrorist regime in Venezuela.

And don’t forget the U.S. deportation partnership that the U.S. government has had with the brutal elected dictatorship in El Salvador.

Another rationale that Trump has cited is the one that President Bush used in the run-up to his Iraq War, a war that Trump ironically criticized when running for office. That rationale? WMDs! Back then, Bush and his cohorts scared the American people to death by declaring that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was about to unleash mushroom clouds over American cities. Of course, it was all bogus but U.S. officials learned a long time ago that the sure-fire way to garner blind and loyal support for U.S. foreign intervention is to scare Americans to death by mentioning the threat of nuclear bombs.

That’s, of course, what Trump and his cohorts have been doing with Iran — conjuring up images that the Iranian dictator was about to do what Bush and his cohorts said Saddam was about to do — unleash WMDs on America. Of course, it’s as big a lie today as it was back then. But it works because there are millions of Americans who are still shaking in their boots over the prospect that the Iranian Ayatollah was coming to get them with WMDs.

However, there is a another possible explanation as to why Trump and the Pentagon have decided to launch their all-out war of aggression against Iran  — a possible explanation that the mainstream press is loathe to consider — one that, interestingly, involves an active partner in this war of aggression — Israel.

That possible alternative explanation for this war of aggression against Iran involves two significant words with which everyone is now familiar. Those two words are … Jeffrey Epstein.

Last July 22, I wrote an article entitled “Get Ready for a Big Foreign Crisis,” in which I pointed out the big MAGA rebellion over the Epstein files. I stated, “Get ready for a big crisis in foreign affairs designed to distract attention from the Epstein scandal.”

I quoted James Madison, who pointed out that this was a favorite strategy of the Roman emperors during the time of the Roman Empire. Whenever Roman citizens were threatening to revolt over things like excessive government spending and the ever-increasing taxation and inflation to fund it, Roman emperors would start a war against some new official enemy, knowing that the Roman rebels would forget their rebellion and instead rally ’round the flag in patriotic support of the Empire.

Soon after my article appeared and as the Epstein rebellion began gathering steam, Trump and the Pentagon began amassing a massive military armada near Venezuela, contending that Venezuela was a grave threat to U.S. “national security,” especially given its illegitimate socialist-communist, narco-terrorist regime (that the U.S. government is now maintaining and partnering with).

Notwithstanding heroic and deadly Naval battles in the Caribbean against suspected small narco-terrorist boats, which conjured up images of the Battle of Midway against the Japanese Navy in World War II, these battles did not significantly distract the MAGA crowd away from Jeffrey Epstein.

Thus, it certainly didn’t surprise me that Trump and the Pentagon immediately shifted their attention and their massive military armada to the Middle East and that they have now unleashed a full-scale attack against Iran rather a simple kidnapping like they did with Venezuela. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this full-scale military intervention against Iran, unlike the limited military intervention against Venezuela, is definitely succeeding in getting the MAGA crowd in full, patriotic support mode, leaving the Epstein scandal in the dust.

Why now? And why Israel too? One distinct possibility is that both regimes — Israel and the U.S. — realize that people might be getting closer and closer to the truth — that Jeffrey Epstein was, in fact, tied in with “intelligence” — which is what the U.S. Attorney in Florida stated he had heard prior to his giving Epstein what is quite possibly the sweetest sweetheart plea bargain in the history of federal criminal jurisprudence. See my recent article “The Real Epstein Rot.” Consider this statement from ChatGPT: “There is no documented instance where a CIA director or other CIA representative has been subpoenaed or brought before Congress to give sworn testimony about Epstein’s alleged ties to the agency.”

If Epstein was in fact working for the Mossad, then he was also working for the CIA, given that those two intelligence agencies have long been joined at the hip. If that is the case — and, in my opinion, that is the only reasonable explanation for that super-sweet federal plea bargain for an accused pedophile — one can easily understand why both regimes — the Israeli regime and the U.S. regime — would jointly engage in a desperate attempt to shift attention away from Epstein and toward a gigantic Israeli-U.S.-produced conflagration in the Middle East.

Indeed, if Epstein was in fact an agent of the Mossad and indirectly of the CIA, one can understand how the Israeli government could easily “persuade” U.S. officials to join Israel in co-producing such a conflagration. All that Israeli officials would have to do is make U.S. officials an offer with respect to Jeffrey Epstein that U.S. officials couldn’t refuse.

This first appeared on Jacob Hornberger’s Expand Freedom blog.

The post Trump, Iran and Epstein appeared first on CounterPunch.org.