Archives: Articles

By Malvika Nair

While the United States President Donald Trump continues his brazen threats against Iran, the latest being a naval blockade after several bombastic genocidal claims earlier this month of bombing the country to the stone ages and wiping its civilisation off, in another corner of the world, Cuba also finds itself at a particularly perilous geopolitical and economic juncture today. The Caribbean island nation, having endured imperialist aggression since the Fidel Castro-led revolution that overthrew the US-backed dictatorship in 1959, is currently facing a grave humanitarian crisis. Through an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January, the US has effectively imposed a total fuel and financial blockade by threatening punitive tariffs on any country that supplies fuel to Cuba. This marks a significant escalation of the already debilitating decades-long economic embargo imposed by the US. Trump, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, have been open about their intentions, stating several times that Cuba “will be failing pretty soon” while making thinly veiled threats that it might be too late for the country if a deal—implying, effectively speaking, capitulation—was not made very soon. Even in the midst of the ongoing war on Iran, Trump made his nefarious designs clear by claiming he would soon be able to “take Cuba” and do whatever he wished with it.

It is evident that the US intends to create the conditions for a total economic collapse in Cuba, which it hopes would lead to popular discontentment and eventually achieve its aims of toppling the communist regime. As an outcome of the illegal blockade being enforced by the financial and military might of the US, fuel supply had almost completely dried out on the island, with only one tanker being able to bring fuel to the country in over a hundred days’ time, causing long hours of blackout and affecting day-to-day life severely. The entire country was plunged in to darkness several times as the national grid collapsed in its entirety. Since the escalation in January, the Cuban government had already been forced to adopt emergency measures to ration its fuel consumption, including prioritising the supply of electricity to hospitals, primary schools and elderly care homes, shortening of the work week, scaling down public transportation significantly, heavily capping personal fuel purchases, amongst other such measures. Emergency services in most hospitals have also been hit hard. Shortages of food and medical supplies have become more widespread, while people are being forced to fall back on wood for cooking. Tourism, on which much of the country’s economy is dependent, is also heavily affected. Re-fueling for international carriers has been halted, while some of the key events that not only serve as symbols of national pride but also attract thousands of people from abroad each year, such as the Feria internacional del libro (International Book Fair) and the Festival del Habano (Cuban Cigar Festival), have had to be postponed, and a large number of resorts had to be closed during the peak of the tourist season, in order to conserve energy.

In the face of this impending humanitarian catastrophe, being engineered via what many call as a ‘genocidal blockade’ by those who have long sought the collapse of the communist government that has resisted Western imperialist designs, how would ordinary Cubans react to this latest attack on their country? If the events of January 2026, when this author spent nearly three weeks in the country, are anything to go by, despite the hardships, it is evident that the extraordinary resilience that the people of Cuba have shown for so long, still remains as strong as ever, and the US’ objectives of bringing them to their knees would not be easy to fulfill.

This January was not just tumultuous for Latin American politics, with the first-ever direct military intervention of the US on a South American country in its display of naked aggression while abducting Maduro, but also was hugely consequential for Cuba. The country has a special relationship with the Bolivarian regime in Venezuela, which is shaped by their shared political commitments and material needs. They signed an agreement in 2000, referred to as an “unprecedented solidarity compensation mechanism”, wherein Venezuela provides subsidised fuel in exchange for skilled Cuban manpower, in terms of healthcare, defense and scientific research. As part of this relationship, the Cuban government also provided security and intelligence personnel to Venezuela, thirty-two of whom were killed in the US raid to abduct Maduro in the Venezuelan capital this January. This is by far the highest number of Cuban casualties in a conflict with the US, since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, signifying the scale of the costs for Cuba itself, and that could have potentially led to a pushback amongst the Cuban people, already besieged economically, against the regime whose current leadership led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, from most accounts, lacks both the authority and the charisma wielded by the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raúl.

Yet, the popular response to these casualties clearly suggests rallying behind the ideals of the revolution, and in turn, behind the regime that is widely seen as the bearer of those ideals. On a rainy Thursday morning in mid-January, the island nation received the remains of the martyrs who lost their lives in Venezuela, and came together to pay their tributes. The remains were placed in the Ministry of Armed Forces building to allow the public to pay their final respects. It was an overcast day, with unrelenting rain, as if the skies too were joining in mourning with people braving the heavy downpour and turning up in tens of thousands, with the queue to enter the building over two kilometres long, and people waiting patiently for their turn, for long hours. Inside the building, the soldiers’ remains were placed with small placards with their names, next to which their photographs and medals were present. The mood was sombre, yet the conversations centred around belief in the cause of the revolution and how the struggle against US-imperialism in light of these latest events needs to be carried on.

The following day, the government organised hundreds of events, each referred to as the ‘Marcha del Pueblo Combatiente’, the March for the Fighting People, across the country, with many hundreds of thousands joining them. The march in Havana originated at the José Marti statue, one of the most powerful figures from the Cuban liberation struggle and a tall figure among Latin American intellectuals, on the historic Plaza de la Dignidad that oversees the US embassy in Havana, and which has served as a powerful venue for protests decrying American intervention in recent decades. That morning, the resolve to defend sovereignty at any cost was evident, with the air filled with slogans of ‘Glory and Honor’, in tribute to the martyrs. People carried the Cuban and Venezuelan flags, posters of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, placards decrying US imperialism, asserting Cuban sovereignty and celebrating the revolution, while calling for the release of Maduro, alongside expressing unflinching solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Young kids perched on their parents’ shoulders, waving the Cuban flag, marching together with those from the generation that participated in the revolution in the 1950s, including Raúl Castro himself, walking on, along the Malecón seafront, the waters that geographically separate Cuba from the US, with impassioned chants such as “Patria o Muerte, venceremos!” (Nation or Death, we will be victorious!), “Viva Fidel!”, “Viva Maduro!” (Long Live) and “Abajo al imperialismo yanqui!” (Down to Yankee imperialism) reverberating in the air, served as a powerful setting to symbolise the unity of the Cuban people against the Donroe doctrine’s machinations for achieving unchallenged hemispheric hegemony.

Even before this latest tightening of the blockade, Cuba was suffering from severe fuel and food shortages. Everyday life being upended by long blackouts, amounting to as high as 14 to 16 hours, even in the capital city of Havana, had been a common occurrence. Routine activities such as cooking and storing food, using mobile phones and laptops, accessing the internet, and other life-sustaining activities became severely affected – a thinly-veiled assault on the very dignity of the people. Private electricity generators remain out of reach for most Cuban families. With the fuel crisis, public transport was also completely disrupted. People were forced to walk long hours to their workplaces, and the working hours of offices, shops, and markets are irregular. Making an already volatile situation even worse, the Cuban currency has been rapidly getting devalued, making the purchase of everyday supplies much more difficult than it already was. For instance, while a pack of a dozen eggs cost upwards of 2 USD, the average monthly salary of Cubans is only a few times higher than that, equivalent to approximately 12-15 USD, much less than even a one-way cab fare from central Havana to the airport, suggesting how suffocating the all-encompassing sanctions to the ordinary Cubans.

Surely, everything is more difficult now – “Está complicado, no es fácil” (It is complicated, things are not easy), is amongst the most frequently resorted to responses, from many with whom this author interacted. But it is also palpable that there is an urgent need to defend what the Cubans had dared to dream, and they seek to do it with dignity, conviction, and a great deal of resilience. It is not very clear at the moment when the present political and economic siege of Cuba will end, but people understand that even in these unprecedented times, it is important to continue to lead their lives, carrying forward the spirit of the Cuban revolution.

Through many decades, under the harsh US sanctions, Cuba did not let the legacy of the Revolution and its internationalist spirit get extinguished. It sent its soldiers to fight in national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles in Angola, South Africa, Congo, and Vietnam, while also dispatching medical brigades all over the world, developing indigenous vaccines, including vaccines against Covid-19 and lung cancer. At this hour, as the US seeks to choke the island into submission, it is crucial that the rest of the world stands in solidarity with the Cuban people’s struggle against Western imperialism, and in defense of their sovereignty and undertake efforts to break this stifling siege of the island.

Malvika Nair is pursuing a PhD in Hispanic Studies, at the University of Warwick (UK), where her thesis looks at the representation of race and caste through Cuban and Indian poetry, respectively.

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

In a display of showmanship, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited southern Lebanon, Sunday, according to the Israeli media. He was accompanied by his Defense Minister Israel Katz and Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir. They are trying to shore up their illegal presence there.

Netanyahu was on what the Jerusalem Post called a “situational assessment” tour of the Israeli troops who are seeking to set up an illegal “occupation security zone” in the southern part of the country and thus encroaching on its sovereignty.

Thousands of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon are meeting stiff resistance from Hezbollah fighters. The Israelis want to establish a security zone in that part of the country in an attempt to stop what they claim as tireless Hezbollah missiles and drones fired and puncturing Israeli northern towns and cities.

In their attempt, the Israeli army are demolishing entire villages and detonating homes in different stretches of the Lebanese countryside to permanently displace people and drive them up to the north of the country.

Netanyahu’s presence in the southern part of the bleeding country is indeed a testimony of a criminal mind for the previous Wednesday, when a two-week ceasefire was signed between the USA and Iran, his airforce unleashed their warplanes and missiles on Beirut and other parts of Lebanon killing at least 250 and injuring over 1100 people in a 10-minute killing debauchery spree and destruction.

The London Guardian has provided a graphic description of what the Israel army is doing in southern Lebanon. The UN estimates that between 1 and 1.2 million were forced to flee their homes to the northern parts of the country and are waiting their return despite the facts that are being created on the ground.

Meanwhile the Israeli army has been pushing forward into Lebanon. They want to establish a security zone from the southern border up to the Litani River which is about 30 kilometers away. However, they are entering Lebanon from different border areas and say they are between 8-10 kilometers deep into different parts of southern Lebanon, depending on the different areas they are entering from. They are already in Khiam, Taybeh, Dier Siryan and Dier Mimas among a host of other villages and towns across the southern divide.

However, their control is checkered. In this last invasion Israeli has lost at least 13 soldiers with around 411 injured and the destruction of at least 100 tanks and military machinery including bulldozers in just the last month.

Take the town of Bint Jbeil, emotionally known as the capital of the revolutionary south. Today it stands as a major flashpoint. Currently, Bint Jbeil which is between four or five kilometers inside the Lebanese border, stands as a fierce point of resistance with Hezbollah fighters in daily direct clashes with the Israeli army.

While the Israeli military controls different parts of the town, they are not able to subdue it. Here, the resistance fighters are in top form. The Israeli army has been trying to control the town for the past month, at least since 16 March 2026 but they are still unable to do so despite attempting to encircle the town from different areas of southern Lebanon.

The re-invasion of Lebanon had been part of the US-Israeli war on Iran which is winding down through Washington’s attempt to reach a ceasefire and an end of the deadly and globally-catastrophic war that is effecting the world economy with its soaring oil prices. However, here, Israel refuses to stop with war until Hezbollah is weakened and disarmed, either unilaterally, through negotiations and by force.

But Hezbollah refuses to disarm or take any measures that would leave it exposed to Israel’s military might. What is likely to happen is a continuation of a war of attrition between the two, despite the fact that the Lebanese government may open talks with Israel in Washington in the coming days.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a Jordanian writer who blogs for crossfirearabia.com

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

As the United States farcically walks away from the negotiations with Iran in Pakistan, it was always a matter of concern whether Israel would abide by any such agreement. This was particularly the case with Lebanon and with the Palestinian territories, where Israel seemed absolutely hell bent on creating new ‘facts on the ground,’ including evacuating more sections of Gaza, ethnically cleaning more towns in the West Bank, and eliminating almost one million people from the entire southern half of Lebanon. Israel has a history with these ceasefires: in the immediate period before a ceasefire, Israel typically bombs with extra ferocity to send a message that it does not really recognize the situation as peace but only as a temporary break between wars. It was, therefore, not clear whether Israel had refused to accept the negotiated fact that Lebanon and the Palestinian territories were part of the ceasefire with Iran or that it was simply bombing with brutality at the start of the truce.

Whatever it might be, the bombing of Beirut – in particular – on 8 April over ten minutes struck over a hundred targets mostly in the Barbour neighborhood of central Beirut. It was horrendous, a total shock to the entire country where already 1 in 5 people have been displaced. Israel claimed that it hit Beirut to strike at Hezbollah, but in fact, as residents said over and over again, Israel hit solely civilian buildings with no concern for human life. The name of the operation, Eternal Darkness, suggests the kind of barbarity that has been inflicted by Israel upon the people of Lebanon.

Fifty Years of Aggression

When I first went to Lebanon about twenty years ago, I met an old taxi driver who told me an interesting story. In the period before 1948, when Israel was created, he would take passengers to Jerusalem (250 miles) and then sometimes from Jerusalem to Damascus (200 miles). There were no borders in those days, he told me, and “we could enjoy the figs of Galilee and the pomegranates from the hills outside Jerusalem.” Alawites, Armenians, Bedouins, Druze, Jews, Lebanese, Maronites, Palestinians, Shia, Sunni, Syrians—whatever they called themselves (and he recited most of these names) all would know each other and would have a cordiality that defined the old world.

That life was shattered in 1948, when Israel was created, and when Lebanon’s small army joined the war to defend the Palestinian people. As it turned out, the Palestinian Nakba(Catastrophe) led to the displacement of 100,000 Palestinians into Lebanon—who then settled under the protection of the United Nations and the Lebanese government in Ain el-Hilweh, Bourj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, Rashidieh, and Shatila. When I visited Rashidieh with my friend Robert Fisk, he took me to meet some of the old Armenian families (who now lived in Tyre proper) that had fled their genocide (1915-1923) in the new Turkey and had taken refuge in this camp in 1936, and it was to their camp that the Palestinians arrived from their villages and towns. Palestinians fled the Israeli terror initially for Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, and then went further afield. The Palestinian camps in Lebanon remain today, where generation after generation of Palestinians have grown up waiting for the day when they can use their old keys to go back home (there are now half a million Palestinians registered in Lebanon).

It took a few years for the Palestinian political formations to reestablish in exile, with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) formed in 1965 in Cairo (Egypt). Within a few years, the PLO rooted itself in the Palestinian camps around Israel and began civil protests initially for control over the camps (which was adopted through the Cairo Agreement of 1969), and slowly moving toward the armed struggle (with more determination and organization after the 1967 Six Days War, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank). When the Jordanian monarchy expelled the PLO from their camps in September 1970, the organization based itself in Beirut and set up a series of important institutions in the country for the battle of ideas and for the armed struggle. The Palestinian camps in Lebanon and the Palestinian institutions in Beirut became direct targets of Israeli attacks, including assassinations (for example: Ghassan Kanafani in 1972; Kamal Adwan, Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, and Kamal Nasser in 1973). Certainly, the PLO had rooted itself as the legitimate political organization of all Palestinians and had become central to life in the camps, alongside the United Nations agency for the Palestinians (UNRWA, which provided the schools, health care facilities, and employment).

In 1978, Israel conducted its first full-scale invasion of Lebanon, Operation Litani, named after the Litani River in southern Lebanon. The Israelis imagined that they would create a security buffer in this land, which comprises 10 percent of Lebanon and was home to hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens as well as Palestinian refugees. The idea was to push the Palestinian fedayeen(fighters) north of the river and keep them out of distance from operations in northern Israel (where Palestinians had begun to agitate for rights from Land Day in 1976 in Galilee). From 1978, Israel repeatedly invaded Lebanon, eroding its sovereignty through such illegal interventions as Operation Peace for Galilee (1982), Operation Accountability (1993), Operation Grapes of Wrath (1996), the July War (2006), and Operation Northern Arrows (2024). During these, and other operations, Israel massacred civilians, attacked the United Nations, and shifted its target from the PLO (which it expelled from Lebanon in 1982) to the Lebanese resistance, largely Hezbollah (which was formed in 1982).

With Lebanon’s own army unable to secure the Blue Line that divides Lebanon from Israel, it was left to Hezbollah and other such para-military and political Lebanese organizations to attempt to protect the country. Twice Hezbollah, under the leadership of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024) defeated Israel (once in 2000, when it forced Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after eighteen years in the country, and second in 2006, when despite heavy bombardment of Lebanon, Israel could not wipe out Hezbollah). These have been the fifty years of aggression, from the first invasion in 1978 to the present, and during this period, Israel has been unable to subdue the Lebanese resistance.

Lebanon’s Fortitude

One day, in an old car, I drove around Beirut’s old neighborhood of Dahieh, literally the suburb but often known as southern Beirut. The Western media calls this the “Hezbollah stronghold,” but what I saw then, and what I have seen in my many trips to the area, is civilians—their homes and their shops. What is also clear in this area is that where Hezbollah exists, it is integrated fundamentally into the lives of the people—not merely as an armed organization, but as a community group that provides the glue to draw people together and to provide them with the means to survive very difficult economic and cultural circumstances. There were, of course, the Hezbollah offices, since Hezbollah under the name Loyalty to the Resistance has fifteen members of Parliament who have a public profile (one of the politicians, Amin Cherri, is a popular figure in the area and has been the one who has been speaking on behalf of the displaced Lebanese in recent months).

It is this neighborhood that has been most fiercely bombed by the Israelis since 1982, and savagely since 2006. There is no section of this part of Beirut that does not feel threatened by Israeli violence. An architecture student I had once designed a building that would be impervious to Israeli aerial surveillance since it would be covered by a canopy of trees and plants on the roof and along walkways through the neighborhood. That is the level of fear and resistance in Dahieh.

Lebanese airspace has no sovereignty as, even on days when there is no violence, Israeli aircraft and drones routinely fly over the country. With a weak Lebanese government, it is left to the imperial powers to denounce the Israeli violence (France, which was the former mandate power over Syria and Lebanon, warned the Israelis against the creation of a ‘New Gaza’ in southern Lebanon). There is no Lebanese army and air force. The entire country would be totally vulnerable to Israeli attack if not for the resistance led by Hezbollah, and therefore the Israeli and the United States designed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (as they have done to everyPalestinian group that opposes the occupation) and so uses the logic of the War on Terror to attack all of Lebanon. The idea that the entire south of Lebanon can be cleared of its hundreds of thousands of people and that it can be made into a buffer zone because Israel wants it goes not only against international law, but against the entire notion of humanity.

During the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, the Israelis decided to build these buffer zones in the West Bank, in Syria, and in Lebanon. Under cover of the bombardment in Gaza, Israel has almost had a free hand to enter the West Bank, remove entire villages, and arrest anyone who is opposed to the occupation; Israel provided the crucial air support for the former al-Qaeda leader Ahmad al-Sharaa to take power in Damascus and then forbid any resistance to Israel from Syria; finally, Israel conducted the most violent bombing campaign in Beirut that not only killed Nasrallah—enormously popular across the Arab world but also in Iran—but killed layers of the leadership of Hezbollah. For a time, Hezbollah looked to be fatally wounded, but in fact it recovered, and its recovery has occasioned this current bombardment—a message to Lebanon to submit to the permanence of Israeli violence.

A decade ago, I spent time with some young Lebanese scholars who were putting their PhDs into books, and I began to read articles and PhDs by others whom I had not met. Each of them seemed to be working on the detritus of the Israeli wars on Lebanon. Joanne Nucho (Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, 2016), Sami Hermez (War is Coming, 2017), Andrew Arsan (Lebanon: A Country in Fragments, 2018), and Munira Khayyat (A Landscape of War, 2022)—the entire sensibility of the nation convulsed by Israeli aggression and in anticipation of the next, inevitable, war. That is the atmosphere of Lebanon – inevitable war, terrible destruction, but necessary resistance against an intractable and inhumane enemy. Robert Fisk’s monumental collection of writings on the region is called Pity the Nation, the title taken from a poem by the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran (from his Garden of the Prophet, 1933). The title of this article is taken from a poem by June Jordan written in 1982 that apologizes to the Lebanese people on behalf of the people of the United States for the atrocities committed upon it. It bears thinking that the world needs to apologize to Lebanon and to Palestine as the genocide by Israel grinds on from Gaza City to Beirut.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist.

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja

Leaders Who could not Lead

“Trump claimed that God supports the United States’ actions in the war against Iran” noted Manilo Dinucci (https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-god-united-states/5922063):“I believe that, because God is good,” he said, “and God wants us to take care of people.”…. Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth, referring to Iran: “An entire civilisation will perish, never to return; 47 years of extortion, corruption and death will finally come to an end. God bless the great people of Iran!” Although the Pope did not mention Trump by name, he stated that “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war”

Discarding the creed of optimism when most hated and feared intervene to twist the logic and truth of reality and act like Pharaoh of the 21st century. An ill-informed conscience is embedded in the triviality of actions and reactions in war against Iran. All actions have consequences as if President Trump and Netanyahu think of extended impunity. Most pernicious consequences are waiting to grab them as it happened to Pharaoh at the Red Sea.Their warmongering is to entrap humanity at large in social, political, legal and economic consequences and tyranny of conclusion to terminate on its own as the process of the Law of Nature. They plan to maximize shortsighted glory and political triumph. Every beginning has its own end without an escape. We, the People, realize there is much evil and much good in our encompassing imagination of the world. Our expectations turned sour that responsible institutions such as the UNO, Western leadership and other global institutions of peace and security would flout their role-play with distressed timidness and ignorance of prevalent reality in global humanitarian affairs.

In a recent article (“How Egomaniac Leaders Call to End Civilized Humanity?” The Ovi Magazine, Sweden: 4/9/25,https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/04/09/how-egomaniac-leaders-call-to-end-civilized-mankind-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/), this author described President Trump and PM Netanyahu as mindless anarchists having ignored the voices of reason and subjected mankind to genocide and crimes against humanity. They behave in arrogance and insolently like the Pharaoh. Do they not stand to meet the same ending as did Pharaoh? Most Israelis protesting at Tel Aviv blame Netanyahu as egoistic and waging war on Iran for personal glory and triumph. The leaders prey on people who elected them whereas the people seem to pray for them to end their fallacy of claims. God created human beings as moral beings unlike other animals and beasts, with a Divine Trust and Accountability for actions on this planet? Leaders enriched with moral, intellectual and spiritual values know life has a purpose, trust and meaning and act responsibly but the 21st century Western leaders are steeped in their own folly and perpetuated ignorance. Insanity is powerless and transitory.

Mike Adams (“Dystopian Nightmare: Ten Unbelievable Things that Will Happen Soon if We Don’t Stop the March of Tyranny and the Enslavement of Humanity.” Transcend Media: 6/16/2023 ), warns of dire consequences tomankind.(https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/06/dystopian-nightmare-10-unbelievable-things-that-will-happen-soon-if-we-dont-stop-the-march-of-tyranny-and-the-enslavement-of Humanity now faces a critical choice: We either choose the path of total enslavement under an authoritarian, techno-fascist dictatorship, or we choose to instead embrace decentralized finance, free speech, rationality and the rule of law. https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-06-16-dystopian-nightmare-10-things-that-will-happen-soon.html

Does President Trump want to Annihilate Civilizations for Israel?

Political tyranny is powerless and transitory.Acroos the globe, people are resilient to understand the sadistic political endeavors of few mindless leaders. President Trump, enticed by Netanyahu, wanted to see Iran and Arabs engaged in fighting and self-destruction. The Strait of Hormuz is blocked unilaterally to shipping as if they own the water of the sea and the possessions of earth. Their sinister plans deny the truth of diplomacy and terms of current ceasefire to give reason a chance for peace and conflict resolution. Remember! Those challenging the Laws of God are chastised by the Laws of God without exception. Are they waiting to meet the same end as did Pharaoh at the Red Sea? The aggression and insanity of war has no logic and sense of morality as human beings. To comprehend immutable reasoning, there is no international law and no Geneva Conventions to safeguard the victims of imperialist war, it is a joke, a rhetoric against Arab-Muslim people across the globe. What have the Arab-Muslim leaders done to stop the killing fields of Gaza and occupied West Bank (Palestine), and the on-going war between Iran and the US, absolutely nothing.

For a long time, most oil exporting Arab leaders lost moral and intellectual values of Islam, appearing too occupied in sports and entertainment away from the pains and horrors of cruelty inflicted by Israel-American policies and practices – the authoritarian Arab leaders learnt nothing from living history. Do the Leaders Live in Hell or with Normal Masses to know the reality? Irresponsible and impotant Arab-Muslim leaders claiming to be mediators for peace and ceasefire are liars, nothing more than puppets of the Western imperialism not to challenge Israel for its planned onslaught of Palestinian masses. The Egyptians, Qataris, Saudis and others carry no values in global context and appear morally, intellectually and politically bankrupt as a scum floating on a torrentof naive puppets and discredited leaders. Please see more:https://realovi.wordpress.com/2025/03/14/howarab-muslim-leaders-betrayed-the-people-by-mahboob-a-khawaja-phd/

The End-Game to Continued the War against Iran and Arabs

Amir Nour and Laala Bechetoula (“What Bombs Cannot Kill. Part III: The World That Burns and the Questions That Remain: https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-bombs-cannot-kill-part-iii-world-burns-questions-remain/5922049) Iran is winning the strategic war. Not because its missiles are more precise than the adversary’s. But because Iran possesses what we call civilizational endurance: the capacity of an ancient civilization, forged over 5,000 years of history, to absorb blows without dissolving. The US and European imperialists sucked out the oil resources from the Arab world and now intend on dismantling the Arab-Muslim world while wagingwar against Iran and the Arabian Gulf region. We, the People reject the violent assumptions of militarization and egoistic triumphs by acts of genocidal plans across Palestine, Iran and humanity. Eric Bogle (1976) sung “The Green Fields of France” a soul searching reminder to humanity:…….But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here, know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause?’
You really believe that this war would end wars?
The suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again!

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution 2019; and Global Humanity and Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution for the 21st Century and Beyond, Barnes and Noble Press, USA, 2025

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ashraf Zainabi

From open hormuz for oil to I am blocking Hormuz for no oil, a brutal power at play

When a leader says, “keep the strait of hormuz open,” it sounds like a call for global stability. When the same voice shifts to “I am blocking Hormuz,” it stops sounding like policy and starts sounding like power speaking without restraint.

This is where the politics of Donald Trump becomes impossible to ignore. His style does not move gradually; it swings. It does not persuade; it pressures. It does not always explain; it declares.

To many, this looks like instability. Statements come fast, positions shift, and the line between warning and action often feels blurred. In global politics, such behavior carries weight. Markets react, allies hesitate, and adversaries calculate risks differently. Uncertainty becomes the first consequence.

There is a pattern beneath the noise. It is the belief that power does not just enforce rules; it creates them. When the United States demands open sea lanes, it speaks the language of global order. When it hints at controlling those same lanes, it speaks the language of dominance. The contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. Trump did not create this contradiction. He exposed it.

Where earlier leaders used careful diplomacy, he uses blunt assertion. Where others softened their intent with layered language, he often states it directly. This makes his politics feel raw, even unsettling, because it removes the comfort of ambiguity. What was once implied is now said aloud.

For supporters, this is clarity. They see a leader who does not hide behind words, who acts decisively, and who prioritizes national interest without apology. For critics, it is dangerous. They see a leadership style that replaces stability with unpredictability and risks turning pressure into provocation. Both views hold a part of the truth.

Trump’s approach is not random. It is high-risk, high-impact politics. It relies on surprise, pressure, and the constant shifting of ground beneath opponents. Sometimes, this forces quick concessions. At other times, it pushes situations closer to the edge.

In regions already tense, especially involving Iran, such a style does not just influence events, it accelerates them. The margin for miscalculation becomes smaller. The cost of error becomes larger.

What makes this deeply concerning is not a single statement or decision. It is the normalization of contradiction. If one power can say “open” today and “blocked” tomorrow, then consistency itself loses meaning. Rules begin to depend not on principle, but on position. And once that happens, others will follow.

This is how global order quietly erodes, not through one dramatic collapse, but through repeated exceptions. Each contradiction becomes easier to justify. Each shift becomes easier to accept. Over time, the line between strategy and impulse fades. So the question is not whether this style is shocking. It clearly is. The real question is whether the world can remain stable under a leadership approach that thrives on unpredictability.

Because when the message changes from keep it open to I am blocking Hormuz, it is no longer just a statement. It is a signal, that power is no longer interested in appearing consistent, only in remaining dominant. And that is where unease begins.

Dr. Ashraf Zainabi is a teacher and researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora J&K

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies

After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the US and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have failed to end Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon or to negotiate international access to the Strait of Hormuz, now under Iran’s control.

The world must use this pause in the war to push for a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement, but we must also start to assess the true human cost of the war–something the US is always reluctant to do in its wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. While we always know the exact number of Americans killed in these wars, we never have an accurate tally of how many people we have killed–not only because it is often hard to get the data, but also because the US systematically downplays civilian casualties and treats their lives as less valuable.

We saw this from the very first day of this war. The US carried out a double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing 175, mostly young girls. Trump’s response was to blame Iran: “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said, and later suggested that Iran might have gotten hold of a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own people.

Minab is not an isolated case—it is a window into a much broader failure by the US government and media, as well as the Iranian government and international media, to honestly reveal the human toll of this 40-day war.

The Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures have not been updated in any detail since March 29, when it put Iranian casualties at 2,076 killed and 26,500 wounded, and there is an obvious mismatch between these two numbers. The ratio between them is much higher than in other wars, or even when compared with the Israeli assault on Lebanon in this war, where Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported 1,830 people killed and 4.927 wounded by April 10, a ratio of 2.7 to 1 between the wounded and the dead.

For further comparison, UN figures for civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine are 15,172 and 41,378 wounded, which is also a ratio of 2.7 to 1. These are certainly under-estimates, like civilian casualty counts in every war, but the ratio between deaths and injuries is realistic, unlike that in Tehran’s casualty figures.

If the Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures were accurate, it would mean that only one person is being killed for every 13 people wounded. But if the figure of 26,500 people wounded was accurate, and the ratio between dead and wounded was similar to what is found in other wars, we would expect that around 10,000 people have probably been killed.

Looking at other sources, the UK-based Iran International website, on March 31, reported Iranian military, militia and police casualties of 4,770 killed and 20,880 wounded, but did not divulge its sources.

Two human rights groups, HRANA and Hengaw, have also published mortality estimates. HRANA, based in Fairfax, Virginia, in the US, is partly funded by the US government, the aggressor in this war. So its data on war casualties are as suspect as its data for casualties during protests in Iran in December and January that the US used as a pretext for the war.

The other human rights group, Hengaw, is based in Norway and Iranian Kurdistan. It reports a total of at least 7,650 people killed by the time of the ceasefire on April 8, of whom 6,620 were military personnel and 1,030 were civilians.

If the Iranian government’s figure of 26,500 people wounded is correct, Hengaw’s count of 7,650 war deaths would amount to a ratio of 3.5 people wounded for each person killed, which would be closer to what one would expect by comparison with other wars.

But the Health Ministry’s figure of 26,500 wounded is also suspect. The Pentagon claims that US and Israeli airstrikes have hit more than 13,000 “targets,” so 26,500 injuries would amount to only two people wounded for each target attacked. This suggests that the count of 26,500 people wounded is itself an undercount, and that the true numbers of casualties in Iran, killed and wounded, military and civilian, are therefore likely to be much higher than any of the numbers reported so far.

While it is easy to understand why the US government doesn’t want to talk about casualties, it seems that the Iranian government doesn’t want to either. If, as we suspect, the true casualty figures are much higher than the health ministry has reported, it may be hiding and downplaying them to prevent panic among the population and keep up the country’s morale, especially in light of the recent large protests in the country. That could also explain why it has not updated its casualty report since March 29.

We would encourage all sides, and independent groups, to cooperate in efforts to accurately count the dead and wounded. Why does this matter? In an illegal war, every death is a crime, while every person killed or maimed is somebody’s husband, wife, father, mother, son or daughter. They should all still be alive and whole. The US armed forces should not be killing or wounding any of them. So some might ask what difference it makes whether they’ve killed 2,000 people, 7,000 or even 70,000.

We would say that it is precisely because each life is precious, and because the pain and horror each person suffers in these violent deaths and injuries is so unacceptable, that each one deserves to be counted and considered. Americans, and our neighbors around the world, need to fully grasp the scale of the mass murder that the US government is committing, so that we can all respond appropriately.

The fact that our government and institutional media downplay the importance of accurate casualty figures and make no effort to discover them only makes it more urgent to find them, as we and others have tried to do during previous US wars.

In 2006, three years into the extraordinarily violent US military occupation of Iraq, public health experts from Johns Hopkins University in the US and Mustansiriya University in Baghdad conducted the second of two epidemiological studies of mortality in Iraq since the US invasion.

The study was published in the Lancet medical journal, and it estimated that, during just the first three years of war and occupation in Iraq, they had caused about 650,000 deaths, including 600,000 violent killings. That was more than ten times higher than previously published figures, which were based on compilations of western news reports and reports from the occupation government’s health ministry.

The study’s results were disputed by those responsible for the war and the mass casualties it caused, including US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But leaked emails revealed that the British government’s chief scientific adviser described the study’s methodology as “close to best practice,” and its design as “robust.” Emails from panicking British officials asked, “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies,” and “…the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished. It is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”

In 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning groups Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) published a report titled Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the War on Terror. In discussing the widely varying mortality estimates for the war in Iraq, the report noted, “Despite the furious criticism it attracted, most experts see the second Lancet study of October 2006 as the most solid estimate of the number of casualties, up to the period of its publication.”

No such comprehensive studies were ever conducted in Afghanistan. The UN published annual civilian casualty figures, but these were only compilations of civilian casualties confirmed by the UN Human Rights Office as it followed up on reports of war crimes and human rights violations reported to its office in Kabul, which excluded any deaths not reported to its office, or that it did not have time to fully investigate.

As is happening with the Iran Health Ministry reports today, the UN’s fragmentary reports were uncritically repeated by the world’s media as if they were realistic estimates of total war deaths in Afghanistan.

Finally, in 2019, after 18 years of war and military occupation, Fiona Frazer, the head of the UN Human Rights office in Kabul, admitted to the BBC that the UN’s reports were not providing a full picture of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

“United Nations data strongly indicates that more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth,” Frazer said, but then added, “Although the number of recorded civilian casualties are disturbingly high, due to rigorous methods of verification, the published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm.”

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were also killed fighting as combatants on both sides in that war. The world’s media were surprised when President Ghani revealed in January 2019 that 45,000 Afghan government troops had been killed since he took office in September 2014. But the US relied on Afghans to fight other Afghans throughout its failed 20-year war in their country.

Whatever the result of the current ceasefire and negotiations, and for however long the US and Israel keep waging war on Iran, the people of the United States and the world must demand a complete and truthful accounting for the human costs of this war, for which Americans and their government bear the prime moral and legal responsibility. At best, that should include the same kind of independent, scientifically-based epidemiological study conducted in Iraq in 2006.

But the demand for accountability starts with a skeptical public and media who can tell the difference between partial, fragmentary casualty reports and serious estimates of total deaths in a violent war zone, and who care enough to want to know how many people their armed forces are really killing and maiming in this illegal war.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

14 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Junaid S. Ahmad

The most revealing feature of Pakistan’s current political discourse is not what is being argued, but what is being deliberately buried — buried under noise, spectacle, and a suffocating cloud of manufactured urgency. Scroll long enough and you will see it: the same hypnotic fixation, repeated with almost ritualistic discipline — is Pakistan’s recent “geopolitical moment,” its role in facilitating backchannel communication between Donald Trump’s Washington and Tehran, a masterstroke or a mirage?

The debate is loud. It is theatrical. It is addictive.

And it is a distraction — a carefully constructed one.

Let us state, without hedging and without qualification: Pakistan is playing its geopolitical hand well. It is not guessing. It is not stumbling. It is inserting itself, deliberately and effectively, into spaces where access is scarce and stakes are high. It is brokering, facilitating, positioning — and doing so with competence. Its geography, networks, and institutional instincts are being deployed with clarity.

On the global board, Pakistan is not peripheral. It is present. It is active. It is, in moments that matter, effective.

Full stop.

And yet this success is not the story. It is the cover story.

Because this is not, in any serious sense, a debate about geopolitics. It is a diversion — a gleaming, seductive decoy designed to pull attention away from the only question that matters: what is actually happening inside Pakistan?

Watch the performance. Regime loyalists elevate Shehbaz Sharif into a statesman of global consequence. Critics roll their eyes and call it theater. But both camps — despite their noise, their posture, their supposed opposition — are orbiting the same dead center: a discourse that ensures the real question is never confronted.

Because the real story is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. It is savage.

A state that locks away a former prime minister — Imran Khan — not through credible justice but through a blizzard of engineered cases, is not governing. It is purging. A system that hunts lawyers like Imaan Mazari through revolving-door arrests, that terrorizes academics such as Hamza Ahmed Khan for speech, that weaponizes courts, codes, and cops to criminalize thought itself — this is not overreach. This is organized repression.

Let us drop the polite vocabulary entirely.

This is a state that devours dissent. It surveils, intimidates, abducts, prosecutes, and, when necessary, erases. It converts law into a blunt instrument, due process into theater, and accusation into punishment. It does not simply suppress opposition — it seeks to break it, publicly and systematically, as a warning to everyone else.

This is not governance.

This is domination enforced with paperwork.

And this is where geopolitics becomes invaluable — not as policy, but as camouflage.

Geopolitics dazzles. It floods the conversation with abstractions — mediation, leverage, alignment — until the brutality of domestic reality is pushed out of frame. It invites citizens to obsess over proximity to power while quietly stripping them of power altogether. It replaces legitimacy with optics, consent with choreography, accountability with applause.

This is not accidental. It is a method honed over decades.

Pakistan’s ruling elite has perfected a cynical exchange: external usefulness in return for internal impunity. From Cold War patronage to the War on Terror — where sovereignty was bartered and figures like Aafia Siddiqui became enduring symbols of that bargain — geopolitical relevance has repeatedly been used to launder domestic repression.

That transaction is alive and well.

What has changed is the desperation behind it.

Because a system that commands genuine legitimacy does not behave like this. It does not panic at criticism. It does not criminalize speech. It does not turn courts into conveyor belts of punishment. It does not need foreign acknowledgment to simulate authority at home. These are not signs of strength. They are the reflexes of a regime that knows, with quiet certainty, that it cannot win consent — only enforce compliance.

And so the contradiction becomes grotesque.

Pakistan is cast as a mediator, a stabilizer, a diplomatic asset — and in geopolitical terms, it is succeeding. But mediation rests on credibility, on trust, on perceived independence. These are not qualities that coexist comfortably with a domestic order built on coercion, fear, and institutionalized intimidation.

Inside the country, the pattern is relentless: political imprisonment as routine, media suffocation as policy, dissent as a prosecutable offense, law as a weapon. This is not background noise. This is the system’s core logic.

Which brings us to the question that the entire spectacle is designed to avoid.

Do Pakistanis live under a system that derives authority from consent? Or under one that manufactures obedience through fear, spectacle, and force?

Everything else — the summits, the mediation, the carefully staged visibility — is secondary.

The real tragedy is not that Pakistan is geopolitically effective. It is. The tragedy is that this effectiveness is being deployed as a shield — a polished surface to deflect attention from a political order that is, at its core, coercive and extractive.

A state can broker dialogue abroad while strangling it at home. It can facilitate conversation in one arena while criminalizing it in another. These are not contradictions. They are the operating principles of a system that performs strength externally while practicing repression internally.

The real test is not whether one applauds Pakistan’s geopolitical success.

It is whether one refuses to be distracted by it.

Until that refusal becomes unavoidable, Pakistan’s geopolitical debate will remain exactly what it has been engineered to be: not an inquiry into power, but an escape from it.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.

11 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ranjan Solomon

War and peace are no longer opposites but points along a continuous field of strategic contestation. At critical chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, power is exercised not through open conflict, but through the capacity to sustain pressure without escalation. It is within this deliberately maintained ambiguity that states secure advantage, shaping outcomes without declaring war or conceding peace. In April 2026, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev described the Strait of Hormuz as “Iran’s nuclear weapons“ due to its immense potential to disrupt global oil supply and influence international economies. He labelled the strait’s power as “inexhaustible” following a ceasefire between the US and Iran.

In contemporary geopolitical discourse, power continues to be measured through visible and quantifiable instruments – military expenditure, nuclear capability, and the reach of economic sanctions. This framework, deeply rooted in Western strategic thinking, assumes that dominance emerges from accumulation: more weapons, more capital, more alliances. Yet, such an understanding proves inadequate when confronted with the case of Iran. The country’s most consequential leverage does not lie in its nuclear programme or even its conventional military strength, but in its geographic position astride the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime corridor through which nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil and a significant share of liquefied natural gas must pass.

The political principle at work is that control over critical economic chokepoints generates systemic power that exceeds the utility of absolute force. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a passage; it is a structural dependency of the global economy. Industrial production, transportation systems, and financial markets across continents are tethered to the uninterrupted flow of energy through this corridor. Iran’s position along this route transforms geography into strategy. It does not need to dominate the global system; it only needs to hold at risk a point upon which the system depends.

This is why the comparison between Hormuz and nuclear capability must be understood analytically rather than rhetorically. Nuclear weapons represent total destruction but limited usability, constrained by doctrines of deterrence and the inevitability of catastrophic retaliation. By contrast, the leverage embedded in Hormuz operates within a spectrum of calibrated disruption. Iran does not need to close the strait entirely to exercise power. The mere capacity to disrupt, delay, or render passage uncertain is sufficient to trigger global consequences. This reflects a broader shift in political power: the ability to manipulate risk and uncertainty has become more consequential than the capacity to unleash absolute force.

The Strait of Hormuz, at approximately 21 miles in its narrowest navigable width, is inherently vulnerable to disruption. Its shallow waters, confined channels, and heavy traffic density create conditions where even minor disturbances can have disproportionate effects. Iran has built its entire maritime doctrine around this reality. It has developed an asymmetric warfare strategy that does not seek parity with superior naval forces but instead exploits their limitations within constrained geography. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, particularly its naval arm, has institutionalized this approach by privileging agility, dispersion, and volume over conventional strength.

This doctrine rests on a clear political logic: weaker states can offset structural disadvantages by increasing the cost of control for stronger adversaries. Iran’s use of fast patrol boats, maritime mines, and coastal anti-ship missile systems exemplifies this logic. These tools do not require large-scale deployment to be effective; their mere presence introduces uncertainty into maritime navigation. Tanker traffic becomes risk-laden, insurance premiums surge, and shipping routes are reconsidered. In this way, economic consequences unfold without the need for decisive military engagement. The objective is not destruction but disruption, not victory in battle but the imposition of systemic cost.

Within this framework, tactics such as coordinated swarm operations take on particular significance. Rather than engaging in direct confrontation, Iran’s forces deploy numerous small, high-speed vessels capable of approaching targets from multiple directions simultaneously. This approach is designed to overwhelm surveillance and defence systems that are optimized for tracking limited threats. The emphasis is on saturation rather than precision, on creating an environment in which even technologically superior naval platforms are forced into defensive postures. The principle underlying such tactics is that complexity and volume can neutralize technological advantage, especially in confined operational spaces like Hormuz.

These maritime strategies are not executed in isolation but are embedded within a carefully constructed territorial network. Islands such as Qeshm Island and Larak Island function as critical nodes in what can be described as an “arch defence” system. Qeshm, the largest island in the Persian Gulf, serves as a logistical and operational hub, housing underground missile installations, drone facilities, and fast-attack craft. Its proximity to the main shipping lanes allows Iran to project force rapidly while retaining the protection of hardened, often subterranean infrastructure. This reflects a principle of modern warfare: survivability and concealment enhance deterrence by ensuring that capabilities cannot be easily neutralized.

Larak Island complements this offensive potential with surveillance and control. Equipped with radar systems, electronic monitoring infrastructure, and observational capabilities, it enables Iran to track and, when necessary, regulate maritime traffic. During periods of heightened tension, such monitoring can translate into active management of shipping routes, effectively transforming open waters into controlled corridors. This introduces a new dimension of power: the ability not merely to threaten disruption but to selectively administer access. In such scenarios, the strait begins to function less as an international waterway and more as a regulated passage under implicit Iranian oversight.

Taken together with other nearby islands—including Hormuz, Hengam, Abu Musa, and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs—this network creates overlapping zones of surveillance and firepower. The result is a layered battlespace in which control cannot be easily asserted by external forces without direct confrontation with entrenched and fortified positions. The political implication is significant: securing the strait would require not just naval presence but sustained military engagement against geographically embedded defences, thereby raising the threshold and cost of intervention.

This structural reality also underpins Iran’s broader strategy of deterrence. The threat of disrupting the Strait of Hormuz operates as a reciprocal mechanism: if Iran’s own oil exports are constrained through sanctions or military pressure, it retains the capacity to impose comparable costs on the global system. This is not an abstract proposition but a calculated alignment of vulnerability. Major exporters such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates depend on this route for access to international markets, while major importers—including India and China—rely on its stability for economic continuity. The strait thus becomes a point where regional tensions translate into global stakes.

In this context, assertions that figures such as Donald Trump “hold the cards” reflect a misunderstanding of how power operates within interconnected systems. Economic sanctions and military threats remain potent tools, but they encounter limits when confronted with structural dependencies that cannot be easily bypassed. The global economy’s reliance on Hormuz constrains the range of viable actions available to all actors, including the most powerful. The principle here is that interdependence redistributes power by embedding vulnerability within the system itself.

Iran’s approach also extends into what is often described as “grey-zone warfare,” a domain in which actions fall below the threshold of full-scale conflict while still producing tangible strategic effects. By intermittently threatening shipping, selectively targeting vessels associated with particular states, or demonstrating military capability without escalation, Iran maintains a persistent state of controlled tension. This strategy allows it to exert influence without triggering overwhelming retaliation, thereby sustaining leverage over time. The underlying logic is that ambiguity and restraint can be as effective as overt confrontation in shaping outcomes.

The cumulative effect of these dynamics is to transform the Strait of Hormuz into more than a geographic feature. It becomes an instrument of economic coercion, a site of strategic negotiation, and a mechanism through which Iran projects power disproportionate to its conventional capabilities. Control here does not require occupation or closure; it requires credible disruption. A complete blockade would constitute war and invite decisive response. Partial, intermittent interference, however, operates within a space where consequences are severe yet escalation remains uncertain.

This distinction is crucial. It reveals that Iran’s strength lies not in its ability to act absolutely, but in its capacity to act selectively. By keeping the strait perpetually within reach of disruption, Iran ensures that every calculation involving the region must account for its presence. The cost of maintaining stability falls on those who depend on it most, while Iran’s role is to maintain the credibility of instability.

In a world increasingly defined by multipolarity, this model of power carries broader implications. It demonstrates that influence is no longer derived solely from scale but from position within networks of dependency. Geography, when aligned with strategy, becomes a force multiplier capable of reshaping global dynamics.

The Strait of Hormuz, therefore, is not simply a point of transit. It is a locus of power where the limits of coercion, the realities of interdependence, and the strategic use of geography converge. To understand Iran’s position in the global order is to recognize that its most potent asset is not a weapon that can be deployed, but a passage that can be controlled.

And in that control lies a form of power that the world cannot ignore.

Ranjan Solomon has worked in social justice movements since he was 19 years of age.

11 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Satya Sagar

On 6th April US and Israeli fighter jets sliced through the sky above Tehran, not to strike missile silos or military convoys, but a university campus with laboratories, lecture halls, a mosque, and an AI research centre. Sharif University of Technology, often called the “MIT of Iran,” was reduced to rubble in the attack.

This strike, alongside the reported systematic degradation of over 30 other Iranian universities, 763 schools nationwide and the prior levelling of educational institutions in Gaza, reveals a diabolical shift in the strategy of the “Enlightened West.” It is no longer enough to contain a rival militarily or economically; the new front is the total erasure of their capacity to read, write, think, innovate, and compete.

The justification, when offered, tends to follow a familiar script and the logic borders on the psychotic. A university is not merely a university; it is a “dual-use” facility. A physics department might someday produce a weapons designer. An AI lab might contribute to military systems. A chemistry lab might become something darker. Therefore so the argument goes the institution itself becomes a legitimate target.

If the mere potential for an Iranian student to use mathematics for a weapon justifies their elimination, then the logic of the empire demands the slaughter of every Iranian child with a high IQ.

Perhaps that is exactly what we are witnessing. When a school is bombed and over 170 girl students are killed at the very start of a conflict, it isn’t a “mistake.” It is a demographic and intellectual culling. It is the realization that a girl who learns calculus in Tehran today is a woman who disrupts the technological hegemony of the West tomorrow.

This is a perverse form of reasoning. It treats knowledge not as a universal human endeavour, but as a latent threat when possessed by the “wrong” people. It is not the existence of knowledge that is dangerous, but its distribution.

There is a second, deeper contradiction at play, that borders on the grotesque. On the one hand, Iran is frequently described in Western discourse as “backward,” “regressive,” governed by a clerical establishment hostile to modernity. On the other hand, its universities are treated as sites of dangerous sophistication – places where cutting-edge research in engineering, artificial intelligence, and science could pose a threat.

If the Iranian leadership were truly the Luddites the Western media portrays them to be, they would be no threat. One does not bomb a country because its leaders are “backward”; one bombs a country because its students are too forward-thinking.

The reality is that Iran has, for decades, invested heavily in higher education. Its universities produce engineers, scientists, and researchers at scale. Female literacy rates are remarkably high – indeed, by some measures, near-universal. Women constitute a significant proportion of university students in many disciplines.

This does not neatly fit the caricature.

And so the contradiction must be managed. Iran must be portrayed as backward enough to justify Western intervention, yet advanced enough to justify fear. Its people must be depicted as oppressed, yet its intellectuals as dangerous. Its society must be both pitied and policed.

The result is a narrative that collapses under its own weight.

None of this is new. The fear of knowledge in the hands of the “other” is as old as empire itself. The Roman Empire tightly controlled the spread of certain forms of learning among its provinces. Colonial regimes across Asia and Africa established education systems designed not to empower, but to produce clerks – useful, but not threatening. The British in India famously debated how much education was “too much” for the colonized population. Knowledge was to be rationed.

Perhaps the most infamous example is that of Nazi Germany. The book burnings of the 1930s were not random acts of vandalism; they were deliberate attempts to purify intellectual life, to eliminate ideas deemed dangerous. Universities were purged. Scholars were exiled. Entire disciplines were reshaped to serve ideology.

The target was not just books, but the very possibility of independent thought.

There is a grim continuity here. When power feels secure, it celebrates knowledge. When it feels threatened, it begins to police it.

What distinguishes the present moment is the nature of knowledge itself. We are no longer speaking only of philosophy or literature, but of technologies that have immediate, tangible power: artificial intelligence, nuclear physics, biotechnology.

These fields blur the line between civilian and military applications. A breakthrough in machine learning can improve healthcare or enhance surveillance systems. A nuclear physicist can work on energy or weapons. The ambiguity is real.

But ambiguity does not justify obliteration. If anything, it demands more nuanced engagement, not less. International cooperation, scientific exchange, and regulatory frameworks have historically been the tools used to manage such risks. The global nuclear order, flawed as it is, emerged not from bombing universities, but from treaties, inspections, and diplomacy.

To abandon these mechanisms in favour of force is to replace complexity with bluntness and to pretend that destruction can substitute for understanding.

The targeting of universities in Iran is not without precedent. In Gaza, educational institutions have repeatedly been damaged in cycles of conflict. Schools, universities, libraries and other spaces of learning have been caught in the crossfire. Two decades ago the invasion of Iraq similarly resulted in the destruction of its educational infrastructure and even the looting of its museums by US soldiers.

The pattern is instructive. When a society is already marginalized, its institutions of knowledge become even more vulnerable. And when those institutions are weakened, the society’s ability to recover, to innovate, to participate in global discourse is correspondingly diminished.

It is a form of long-term incapacitation. One does not need to invoke conspiracy to see the effect: a population deprived not just of infrastructure, but of intellectual infrastructure.

At the heart of this lies a deeper anxiety one that is rarely articulated openly.

What if the “Third World” were to become not merely politically assertive, but intellectually competitive? What if countries long relegated to the periphery began to produce world-class research, technologies, and cultural output? What if they ceased to be markets and became rivals?

This is not a hypothetical scenario; it is already happening. Countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are investing in education, research, and innovation. The global distribution of knowledge is shifting.

For those accustomed to dominance, this shift can feel destabilizing.

And so the temptation arises not necessarily as a conscious conspiracy, but as a structural impulse to slow it down. To frame knowledge as dangerous when it emerges from the “wrong” places.

What makes all this particularly jarring is the moral language often employed. Actions taken in the name of “security” are framed as necessary, even regrettable. Civilian casualties are described as unintended. The destruction of infrastructure is presented as collateral damage.

But when the infrastructure in question is a university, the language begins to ring hollow.

A university is not a weapons depot. It is a place where ideas are formed, debated, contested. It is where a society thinks about itself and its future. To target it – whether directly or through reckless indifference – is to strike at the possibility of thought itself. And to do so while claiming to defend civilization is an inversion so complete it borders on satire.

If the presence of scientific expertise in a country is grounds for suspicion, then the only “safe” world is one in which such expertise is monopolized. If the potential for misuse justifies pre-emptive destruction, then every school becomes a potential target.

It is a logic that, taken seriously, leads to absurdity and, more dangerously, to atrocity.

Perhaps the most unsettling possibility is this: that the fear is not of weapons or “terror”. The US and Israeli elites are fighting a war on parity. A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated. It is a world in which narratives can be challenged, technologies developed independently, and cultural influence diversified.

For those at the centre of existing hierarchies, this can feel like loss. And so the temptation is to frame that loss as danger. It arises from fear of a world in which knowledge is no longer the preserve of a few. It tells us that the battle is not only over territory or ideology, but over who gets to think, to innovate, to imagine.

And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous battlefield of all. As the cruel slaughter of little girls at the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab clearly demonstrated to the entire world.

Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker who can be reached at sagarnama@gmail.com

10 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By GHADA KARMI

The US-Israel war on Iran that started on 28 February is currently on pause for a two-week ceasefire. Whether it will lead to a permanent peace or break down into hostilities once more is unknown. But when the dust finally settles and it is time to review the lessons learnt from this illegal war, the most important must be that the state of Israel has to be dismantled as an act of political necessity and in pursuit of world peace.

The ferocious US-Israel war on Iran has lasted six weeks, raining death and destruction on its leaders and citizenry. In that time over 2000 Iranians have been killed, at least 20,000 injured, and over 3 million displaced.

Israel has assassinated scores of Iranian officials and Iranian leaders – most prominently, the Supreme leader, Ali Khamanei, the seasoned security chief, Ali Larijani, and the head of intelligence, Esmail Khatib. It is still trying to do so.

Thousands of Iranian targets have been struck, among them, and most irresponsibly, Iran’s nuclear plant. A particularly egregious attack on 8 March targeted Tehran’s oil depots, covering the city with dense clouds of toxic smoke. The environmental damage from this act is incalculable for humans now and into the far future. Tehran’s soil is poisoned, and its water supply contaminated, who knows for how long.

As could easily have been predicted, Iran shut off the Strait of Hormuz to shipping on 2 March. Consequently, this raised the global price of oil, fertiliser, and other essential commodities. Iran’s retaliatory attacks on neighbouring Gulf states’ energy infrastructure only aggravated these effects, with oil trading at $110 a barrel at one point, and some forecasters predicting a disastrous future rise to $200 a barrel. On 18 March Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gasfield, the largest in the world, and shared with Qatar. Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s vital liquefied gas facility, which will take years to repair, and the energy infrastructure of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

If it restarts, the Iran war has the potential to damage or even destroy the global economy, trigger a nuclear war if Iran refuses to surrender to the attacking powers, and lead to significant political realignments in the Middle East and beyond, which could be irreversible. A recent meeting of the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to discuss Iran may serve as an early indication of this trend.

In the storm of events since the war started Israel’s mischievous role in bringing the world to this pass should not escape attention. By his own admission, Israel’s prime minister has schemed for 40 years to achieve the destruction of Iran. For Israel, Iran’s standing as a strong, independent state with an ancient civilisation, a proud heritage, and a highly educated population, resistant to Western domination, is intolerable.

Iran forms the last obstacle to Israel’s ambition towards total hegemony in the Middle East, which it is currently imposing by destroying Lebanon, starving the people of Gaza to extinction, and ethnically cleansing the West Bank of its Palestinian population.

It should always have been clear that Israel would seize any chance to attack Iran. The US counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, who recently resigned in protest over American involvement in the Iran war, spilt the beans in his letter to President Trump. “Iran posed no imminent threat”, he wrote. The war started “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Looking at the list of regional disasters since Israel was created, does anyone seriously believe any of it would have happened if Israel had not existed? Or doubt how differently – and better – the Middle East might have fared if Israel had not been planted in its midst?

Since its inception in 1948, this artificially created settler colony has left a trail of destruction in its wake. Palestine’s indigenous people, who still bear the brunt of Israel’s founding, were transformed from settled communities living peacefully in their homeland into refugees, exiles, or targets of occupation. They are currently victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing. And to this day, their plight remains unresolved.

Because of Israel’s existence, five Arab-Israeli wars erupted between 1948 and 2006, all of them damaging and costly. The Arab world’s rich resources that should have gone to Arab social and economic development in the wake of decolonisation were instead diverted into military spending to defend against Israeli belligerence.

Constant Western interference to protect Israel sowed division among Arab states, often resulting in them fighting each other instead of Israel.

Generations of young Arabs have been reared on an abnormal diet of belligerency and war with Israel, inciting fundamentalism and radicalisation amongst them. Israel’s deliberate early policy of encircling the Arab world by making alliances with hostile regional non-Arab, non-Muslim states further retarded Arab development and has spread to other countries.

Put simply, Israel’s presence has conferred no conceivable benefit on the Arab world, but instead retarded its progress. It has helped maintain Arab dependency on the West and, by acting as a local agent of imperialism, has prevented progress towards Arab emancipation from it.

From the beginning of its existence, Israel has always pursued its own agenda, despite the West’s generous support, and has now inevitably brought the world to the brink. Given this dire situation, isn’t it time for Israel’s Western backers to draw the obvious conclusion and admit that Israel’s creation was a dangerous mistake? The West created a state that is neither capable of reform nor of coexistence. No efforts at accommodation and regional normalisation have succeeded in transforming Israel from a supremacist ethno-religious entity into a friendly, peaceable part of the Middle East.

In 1948, it took a coalition of Western governments to make Israel, and it will take no less than a global coalition to unmake it. That must now be the urgent task of all peace-loving governments and peoples before more blood is spilt.

It will not be easy. Dislodging from the hearts and minds of the West the conventional idea of Israel as a refuge for Jews, a path to atonement for anti-Semitic Europeans, and a local agent for Western interests is a monumental task.

But it must be attempted.

11 April 2026

Source: ghadakarmi.substack.com