Babylon The Great’s Arrogance (Revelation 17)

 
US learning nothing from past mistakes: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, editor of Veterans Today, to discuss the remarks made by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, saying Iran will continue to distance itself from the United States.

Here is a rough transcription of the interview:

Press TV: What do you make of this warning, so to speak, being issued by the Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution to maintain this distance between Iranian officials as well as those of the US?
Barrett: I think it is absolutely justified and appropriate. The US is indeed an arrogant power and the history of US relations with Iran demonstrates that. The overthrow of prime minister Mosaddeq in 1953 was an act of extreme arrogance. It was one of the early CIA coups that set the stage for the dozens of regime changes and overthrows of legitimate governments that have followed and of course that is what also set the stage for the 1979 Islamic Revolution which led to Iran becoming an independent country, a fully independent country with a certain animosity towards the United States for very, very good reasons.

And rather than learn from their mistakes, the American side has persisted in its arrogance continuing to try to destroy the Islamic Revolution in Iran and continuing to overthrow governments around the world. It seems that it learned absolutely nothing from the blowback it suffered in 1979 after it overthrew prime minister Mosaddeq. So clearly if anybody in the world is in a good position to see the persistent folly of American arrogance, it is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Press TV: So this obviously stems from this historic distrust of the US when it comes to its dealings with Iran as you just pointed, but also that even at a time when we are at the post-JCPOA era, it does not necessarily mean normalization of ties?

Barrett: Well that is right because the problem is that the US is still ruled by people who view normalization as a normal state of American imperial hegemony. A uni-polar world. For them normal does not mean equals, even being the first among equals and many parts of the world would settle for the United States being of course among equals. But unfortunately we still have this ideology of American exceptionalism that infects the minds of the leadership here in the United States.
These people really believe that for some reason America is the necessary nation and that to them means that the United States has to maintain 100,000 military bases all over the world, occupying all these countries and even a presidential candidate like Trump who is in hot water with the neoconservatives and the hardliners because he is a little bit skeptical about NATO and about American imperial occupation of the globe. Even he arrogantly says that his solution is to make the occupied countries pay for their occupations.

So it seems that this imperial hubris and arrogance is pretty much a fixed non-negotiable quality here in the United States. But before I leave off, I have to say that with regards to the US Middle East policy, we have to note that the leader of the arrogant countries may not be the United States anymore. It may be the state of Israel which has been occupying the United States since it overthrew American policy and instituted Israeli policy on September 11, 2001.

US Fails to Convince the Asian Nuclear Horns

U.S. and China appear to be at an impasse over North Korea and the South China Sea

Jonathan Kaiman Contact Reporter

Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi appeared to reach an impasse Wednesday over the severity of prospective sanctions for North Korea, three weeks after the isolated country conducted its fourth nuclear bomb test.

Kerry arrived in Beijing on Tuesday night after two days in Laos and Cambodia, and met with Wang for more than four hours Wednesday morning. North Korea “topped the agenda,” he told reporters at a news conference afterward.

At the conference, Kerry and Wang painted a positive picture of U.S.-China relations in broad strokes, discussing “cooperation” on a range of issues including the Iranian nuclear deal, wildlife trafficking and combating the Ebola virus.

Yet their failure to bridge a deep divide on North Korea’s nuclear program and Beijing’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea illustrated the fragility of the region’s security environment.
On Jan. 6, North Korea announced that it successfully conducted its first underground test of a hydrogen bomb; experts said that a nuclear bomb clearly detonated but raised doubts about Pyongyang’s claim of owning a significantly more powerful thermonuclear weapon.

Beijing has provided an economic lifeline to North Korea for decades and fears that unrest in the country could destabilize China’s northeastern provinces.

“North Korea poses an overt threat, a declared threat to the world,” Kerry told reporters. He proposed negotiating a U.N Security Council resolution to tighten sanctions on North Korea, dealing a potential blow to China-North Korea trade in industries including aviation, shipping, and the exchange of resources such as fuel and coal.

“The U.S. will do what is necessary to protect the people of our country and our friends and allies in the world,” he said. “All nations, particularly those who seek a global leadership role or have a global leadership role, share a fundamental responsibility to meet this challenge with a united front.”

Although Wang agreed that the U.N. Security Council must pass a new resolution in response to the nuclear test, he balked at the prospect of tightening sanctions. “Sanctions are not an end of themselves,” he said. “We must point out that the new resolution should not provoke new tension in the situation, much less destabilize the Korean peninsula.”

Experts said that China likely does not see much upside in adopting the U.S.’ proposed framework for dealing with Pyongyang.

“On the nuclear side, I’ve never had any doubt that the Chinese want to end this program but they don’t see a strategy in the international community to achieve that goal,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior advisor for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “A lot of people think China is the missing link and if only it would get on board with sanctions that North Korea could be compelled to give up its nuclear weapons. The Chinese just don’t look at it like that.

“They play out in their minds, what are the consequences if they really agree to very tough sanctions — if they cut off oil deliveries to North Korea?” she added. “So that creates instability in North Korea most likely, then China ends up with a crisis on its border that potentially brings U.S. troops closer to China, and you end up with a worse situation than when you started.”

On Wednesday morning, China’s New China News Agency accused Washington of “uncompromising hostility” toward North Korea, “flaring up the country’s sense of insecurity and thus pushing it towards reckless nuclear brinkmanship.”

Kerry also reached loggerheads with Wang regarding China’s maritime ambitions, which have riled the country’s neighbors and threatened the region’s U.S.-led security order.

China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, a potentially oil and gas-rich area of the western Pacific Ocean dotted with remote islands and reefs. Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also claim parts of the sea as their own.

China has stepped up its claims in recent years with a series of heavyweight projects, including building artificial islands on a shoal also claimed by the Philippines. In October, the U.S. sent a warship within 12 nautical miles of these islands, drawing harsh rebukes from Beijing.

“The South China Sea islands were historically China’s territory, and China has a right to protect its maritime sovereign and legal rights and interests,” Wang said at Wednesday’s news conference. He denied accusations that China has militarized its artificial islands, adding that Beijing has built “some necessary facilities for self-defense.”

Southeast Asian countries are indeed divided over how to handle the issue, and the lack of consensus has allowed China to advance its projects with limited opposition.

Kerry said he also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and that they had a “constructive discussion.”

Before his meetings in China, Kerry visited Laos, a landlocked, deeply impoverished country of 7 million people between Thailand and Vietnam, and Cambodia, which enjoys close economic ties with China and tends to side with Beijing on issues of maritime rights.

Although the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, a 10-member regional bloc, could band together to counter China’s territorial claims, internal divisions have stymied attempts at collective action. In 2012, Cambodia blocked mentions of the disputes at a summit in Phnom Penh, leading the association to fail to issue a joint communiqué.

ASEAN leaders will attend a summit hosted by President Obama in California in February. Laos is the association’s chair.

During his visit to Laos, Kerry — only the second U.S. secretary of State to visit the country since 1955 — promised to boost U.S.-funded programs to ameliorate malnutrition and remove unexploded ordnance left from the Vietnam war. China, meanwhile, has promised the country major investments in infrastructure, including a high-speed rail line.

China’s state media have responded to U.S. pressure on the South China Sea issue with significantly less restraint than the country’s foreign minister.

“Washington’s strategy has fed the strategic distrust between China and the US, and prompted smaller countries in the region to vacillate between the two powers and try to benefit from their contest,” said a Tuesday commentary in the state-owned, notoriously bombastic Global Times newspaper.

“Many of them are manipulated by Washington behind the scenes as a proxy to counter China. Washington instigates some smaller nations to challenge China in the South China Sea, one of China’s core interests, and sugarcoats itself as a defender of justice.”