Larry Johnson & Pepe Escobar: Iran Strikes Back At Israel; What Comes Next

by Counter Currents [ 10-3-2024 published].

Love me some Pepe. Pepe Escobar and I first met last December, during my first trip to Moscow. We were instant friends. When I arrived in Moscow in the midst of a record-breaking snowstorm, I was standing in line waiting to check in to the hotel and noticed that the man in front of me looked remarkably like Pepe Escobar. The man turned, looked at me, and then said, “Oh my God! You’re Larry Johnson.” And I said, “You look like Pepe Escobar.” He laughed with his iconic good cheer and we immediately agreed to meet for drinks and a snack. This was the birth of a dear friendship.

Apart from Alastair Crooke, an icon in his own right, I could think of no one better than Pepe with whom to mull over the implications of Iran finally delivering on its promise to retaliate against Israel for the murder of Ismail Haniyeh. Most of the Western media is reporting the Iranian attack as “unprovoked.” Just one more example of the corruption and lies that undergird the so-called free press in the West.

There was a lot of behind-the-scenes action, in Israel and in Tehran, that the media is ignoring. The biggest story, one that Pepe brought to light, is the internal ruckus in Iran pitting President Pezeshkian against Ayatollah Khameni. Pezeshkian admitted that he was bamboozled by the West, naively believing that if Iran held back from launching retaliatory missiles at Israel, that Netanyahu would stop the slaughter of Palestinians and that a ceasefire would come to pass.

Instead, the promised ceasefire was a deadly trap. According to Lebanon’s foreign minister, Nasrallah had agreed to call a ceasefire and was meeting with an Iranian General to discuss the matter when both were assassinated. Richard Steven Hack has written a good piece explaining how it appears that the ceasefire proposal was a ruse to entrap and murder Nasrallah. This is just one of the issues Pepe and I discuss.

Related Resources

Larry Johnson & Alastair Crooke: Middle East on Fire Israel-Hezbollah War Escalates [9-28-2024]

How Nasrallah Was Tricked Into Dying [10-3-2024 by Richard Steven Hack]

Wherein I explain how the US and Israel set up Nasrallah to be assassinated...

It looks like every single day a new low is revealed for the US and Israel.

Antiwar.com today reported the following news, which I reproduce in full here:

Lebanese Foreign Minister Says Nasrallah Agreed to Ceasefire Right Before Israel Killed Him.

Abdallah Bou Habib says Nasrallah agreed to a US-French proposal for a 21-day ceasefire

by Dave DeCamp October 2, 2024 at 5:24 pm ET Categories NewsTags Israel, Lebanon

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib has said that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a US and French-proposed 21-day ceasefire with Israel right before Israel killed him.

Habib said the US and France told Lebanon that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed to the ceasefire proposal.

“They told us that Mr. Netanyahu agreed on this, and so we also got the agreement of Hezbollah on that. And, you know what happened since then,” Habib told CNN host Christiane Amanpour.

On September 25, the US, France, and several other nations released a joint statement calling for an immediate 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon to give time to reach a diplomatic solution to the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border and reach a ceasefire in Gaza. The following day, Netanyahu arrived in New York for the UN General Assembly and rejected rumors that Israel agreed to the truce.

US officials told the media that they coordinated the ceasefire proposal with Israel and were “frustrated” with Netanyahu for rejecting it. But the US put no real pressure on Israel to agree to the ceasefire. The same day Netanyahu rejected it, Israel announced it secured another $8.7 billion in military aid from Washington.

On Friday, September 27, Netanyahu ordered the massive airstrike that killed Nasrallah from a hotel in New York, following his address to the UN. Israeli officials told ABC News they decided to kill Nasrallah because he wouldn’t negotiate a diplomatic solution without a ceasefire in Gaza.

If it isn’t obvious to everyone upon reading the above - and I suspect it isn’t because people aren’t as devious as I am - let me spell it out for you.

THE. ENTIRE. CEASEFIRE. PROPOSAL. WAS. A. PLOT. TO. KILL. NASRALLAH.

Of course the ceasefire proposal was so much bullshit, as well - just look at the parties promoting it: United States, Australia, Canada, European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Qatar. All of them wanted Nasrallah dead. And most of them couldn’t care less about a ceasefire for the Palestinians.

Then the US and Israel went to the stupid Lebanese Foreign Ministry - and who knows what their motivations were - and got them to communicate with Hezbollah.

Now whether Nasrallah actually agreed to the proposal, we don’t know. We only have the word of the - possibly compromised - Lebanese Foreign Minister for that.

What we can easily surmise is that Hezbollah decided to have a meeting to discuss the proposal. For this, Nasrallah and his top team would have to meet in the same place at the same time. Due to operational security issues, such a meeting could not be done by networked electronic means because those would be entirely compromised by Israel and the US since forever. This is precisely why Hezbollah ordered earlier this year that Hezbollah operatives should not carry cell phones and rely more on Hezbollah’s hard-wired encrypted optical land lines and pagers - only to succumb to the CIA/Mossad/Mi6 orchestrated pager supply chain terrorist attack that resulted in 1600 Hezbollah operatives’ deaths, along with another 1,500 Lebanese civilians.

And that sealed Nasrallah’s and his senior team’s fate.

Exactly how Nasrallah’s location was revealed is unknown. There are all sorts of rumors going around about penetration of Iran’s IRGC by Mossad as well as reported penetration of Hezbollah’s inner circle. I consider most of them to be either people over-thinking it - as intelligence analysts are wont to do (read: Scott Ritter) - or are deliberate attempts to sow doubt and division not only inside Hezbollah but in the rest of the Axis of Resistance as well.

Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou did a show the other day on their The Duran Youtube channel about how Hezbollah had become “corrupt” and might “fall apart” as a result. I call bullshit on most of that speculation, in particular the notion that the entire organization might collapse due to the loss of its top leadership. This almost never happens to insurgent groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. How many times has the US declared the top leadership of Al Qaeda and ISIS killed? They’re still around. I’ve no idea why Mercouris decided to settle on that notion, but subsequent performance by Hezbollah over the last two days has shown that it was incorrect.

But there’s no denying the possibility of a serious compromise at some level in the Hezbollah organization. As others have pointed out, Lebanon is a hotbed of spies from all over the Middle East and pretty much always has been. As Hezbollah has grown in size over the last twenty years, especially due to its involvement in the Syrian civil war, opportunities for its enemies to penetrate the organization would have grown.

The bottom line: It doesn’t really matter whether there was an internal compromise or whether the hit was enabled by sophisticated Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) or on-the-ground Human Intelligence (HUMINT). The plot worked - it got Nasrallah and his team to a location at a specific time where they could be hit. That the plan was in motion is clear from the reported number of Israeli aircraft - and reported US air surveillance assets in the vicinity at the time - that would have had to be loaded and ready to go when confirmation of Nasrallah’s location was received by Israel and US intelligence. You can’t pull that off in the space of a couple hours long meeting. The presence of US air assets also proves that the US knew of the plot and was participating in it - indeed, may even have enabled it.

In other words, the important takeaway is that THIS. WAS. A. PLOT.

The Antiwar article states: “US officials told the media that they coordinated the ceasefire proposal with Israel and were ‘frustrated’ with Netanyahu for rejecting it.”

Once again for the retared: this is a bullshit cover story intended to redirect blame from the Biden administration for its part in this plot. As the article also pointed out, the same day Netanyahu conducted the assassination, the US gave Israel another $8.7 billion dollars to continue his war.

If this doesn’t finally prove to everyone that the US and Israel are both devoted to starting a major war in the Middle East - to include Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran - then everyone is a moron - an opinion, as you know, I already share.

And yet… And yet… People are still going to be talking about how “Netanyahu played Biden.” Can we PLEASE put that bullshit to bed? Biden and the US administration - which is entirely dominated by neocons - are not being “played” by anyone, let alone Netanyahu. I refer you yet again to Brian Berletic’s analysis of the Brookings Institute 2009 paper (PDF download) in which the plan to start a war with Iran is laid out in excruciating detail.

What is actually happening is a “perfect storm” of conjoined interests. Just as the 2003 Iraq war was planned by and promoted for the benefit of a whole host of parties - the neocons, the Israelis, the Bush administration, NATO, the oil companies, the military-industrial-complex, and the banks that finance those companies - so, too, is this war being planned and promoted by the same parties. There may be the occasional tactical conflict, but everyone is on board with the ultimate outcome.

Shit doesn’t change. It’s still shit. And it will remain shit until it is flushed down the toilet and decomposed into its component elements.

Unfortunately, you, dear reader, have zero power to do that with your governments.

So you are going to get a major Middle East war - which may eventually turn nuclear at any moment - and a global economic collapse as the oil facilities are destroyed - another article at Antiwar.com today: “Biden Says US and Israel Are Discussing Strikes on Iranian Oil Facilities”.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you.