Make No Mistake: The War Everyone Fears Is Already Here -Peace & A New Beginning Are Not On The Horizon

Corey Hunt / Canada Free Press

War must be averted. This is the appealing narrative, the glue that has held the theater of the Iran nuclear negotiations together for more than a decade as Western and UN powers try to talk it out with the Islamic Republic in Geneva.

It makes sense, in its own right, as nobody should want a war—as in a confrontation where bombs are falling, cities are destroyed and a lot of people end up dead. The Obama Administration has been steadfast in presenting war as the only alternative to the marathon talks, a dire warning from a president who won the Nobel Peace Prize supposedly because his commitment to diplomacy would save the world from witnessing future Iraq scenarios. God forbid that should happen again, right?

But hold on there. Putting aside the fact that President Obama bungled an invasion of Libya and unleashed anarchy that is drowning thousands of fleeing refugees by the boatload, the idea of a grand bargain with Iran is an illusion, or worse, a deliberate deception. For all the song and dance in Switzerland, for all the talk of moderates, hardliners, and the deal of a lifetime, the war everyone thinks they are avoiding is already here. On one front after another, the Middle East is on fire—and behind many of them is the hand of the Shiite-Islamist Iranian regime, the same one making a lot of promises to diplomats all too eager for their own shot at the Peace Prize.

Syria has been reduced to rubble as Iran holds the line for dictator Bashar al-Assad

Evidence considered it is difficult not to notice this. Syria has been reduced to rubble as Iran holds the line for dictator Bashar al-Assad in his battle against an uprising, the country transformed into a ravaged hell that has produced more refugees than almost any other conflict since the Second World War. Next door, Iraq has been reignited after a period of relative calm that made it safer than many Latin American countries. In Yemen—the country cited by President Obama as the model for solving the new, before mentioned Iraq crisis—civil war rages in the streets as Iranian-backed rebels advance, the US presence on the ground heads for the hills, and starvation threatens millions. Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah rule the Gaza Strip and Lebanon respectively, sitting atop a massive arsenal of weaponry that can spark a conflagration with rivals or Israel at any moment. All this is going on while Iran itself ramps up executions and leaves anti-government activists rotting in jail—under the “moderate” president, Hassan Rowhani.

Syria is probably the most ghastly of all these horror shows, where inaction and in most cases a chilly silence prevails as Syrians are butchered daily in triple digit figures—some in their homes, some in schools, and others on the street trying to shop for vegetables. Are these not the kind of images, the idea of suffering on everyone’s minds when we shudder at the thought of a possible war with Iran? The driving force behind this relentless slaughter has been Assad’s punishing air raids, backed up by a conglomeration of Shiite warlords and torturers from across the world, all organized and supported by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) forces. For a quarter century Assad and his family have been an essential tool of Iran’s leaders, and their efforts to preserve that influence and keep him in place long after the official “Syrian Army” was defeated have taken a devastating toll on the human race.

Certainly, the anti-Assad forces on the ground, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and others, have committed their own atrocities at times. But none of the weaponry they possess comes close to the scorched-earth destruction unleashed by Assad’s aerial assassins, some of which has been documented in the stunning photos of decimated districts in the central city of Homs such as Khalidiyeh and Baba Amr, or throughout the traumatized northern city of Aleppo where barrel bombs fall from the sky more often than rain.

In reality, the only other actor that comes somewhat close to matching Assad’s reign of bloodshed is the Islamic State (IS) or ISIS—who are often described as an anti-government, Sunni-Islamist rebel faction, despite their limited interest in battling regime forces. It should be noted and never forgotten that practically all of the territory IS holds in Syria today was taken at the expense of Assad’s FSA opponents, and that the IS predecessor—Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—used Syria as a staging ground for its war against Iraq during the US occupation. Despite this, some US politicians—including Senator Rand Paul and his father, Ron—continue to present Assad as some kind of secularist bulwark against terrorism and violent Islamism. It is grossly flawed logic, but like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton calling Assad a reformer in 2011 after years of evidence to the contrary, it always finds a way to come full circle after unraveling.

Iraq: where Iranian-backed Shiite militias have been looting, burning, and killing their way through northern towns like Tikrit