President Trump didn’t bother to consult with America’s European allies before attacking Iran. Yet now he wants their help, both to finish off Iran—which is proving to be a formidable adversary—and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to oil and gas tankers. He’s like your drunken friend who picks a fight at the bar and then wants you to help him.
Help Me, You Jerks!
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The EU’s (legal, if suicidal) elite has committed its member states, and their industries, to completely cutting themselves off from the reasonably priced and reliable Russian petrochemical energy sources that had, in essence, created the post-WWII European prosperity.
This was catalyzed by the US 2014 coup in Ukraine that, as cynically calculated by the US, served to renew a dark and deep-seated Russophobia (see Napoleon, Hitler and “the Northern Crusades”) that apparently overrides any realization of the role of energy in human life, much less in its handiwork … “the economy, stupid.”
Now, as the comic above, the apparent refusal of the EU to join the US in its own imperial suicide by aggressive, illegal, unprovoked, full scale^^^ war on Iran, refreshingly contradicts the unmitigated EU folly of having sanctioning itself into the Stone Ages (sic) to “save” Ukraine, or more accurately, to finish WWII to the liking of still active Nazism – this time with identifiable US “collaboration” or, more accurately, “direction.”
Perhaps this resurgence of EU practicality – to not throw away a critically needed new source of petrochemical supply – seems a flush of sanity only in comparison to the imperial psychotic break on full display. How difficult is it to understand: “You are quite welcome to buy our oil … but only if you refrain from trying to kill us all”?
On a related note: “Economic sanctions*** imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths ANNUALLY from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106 000 deaths).” Assuming the same death rate, post 2021, for Western sanctions, some 31 million have been killed in the 55 years to present. Source: The Lancet Global Health >>> @ https://tinyurl.com/44ax5v9v
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^^^ some say even a) unconstitutional and b) justifying a shift into a “war economy.” See, for example, the proposed 67% increase in already bloated War (aka “Defense”) Department spending apparently to be considered soon in the US Congress
(i.e: Knesset West)
*** E.G.: Forty-seven years CONTINUOUSLY on Iran since 1979. So who, exactly, has been slaughtering whom in the extended US campaign to obliterate Iran?
Man, Mainstream Liberal Ted is funny.
I know “roundhouse” and “gifle.” Can I get a translation on “intregance” and “brikbrak”?