HARBINGER

We do indeed live in interesting times. And that's cold bloody comfort for the 99.999% of human society who are at best mere spectators of the events unfolding in the Middle Eastern imbroglio aka Iran /Iraq /Syria. Having brazenly violated recognised tenets of International Law as well as long held diplomatic norms and conventions, POTUS Trump as Commander-in-Chief threatened in the most egregiously graphic terms to annihilate Iranian cultural sites should the government in Tehran consider some of retaliatory action against the US for its assassination of General Soleimani. Even the most reliably docile and compliant lickspittle NATO lackeys of the US were moved to point out that Trump's apocalyptic threat,if enacted,would constitute a war crime. Trump and his coterie of war-mongering Neocon hawks -Pompeo et al blithely acknowledged this a couple of days later and muttered something about of course the'll be obeying international law on this matter. Meanwhile, ele...

Back in 1982,in the middle of the ColdWar ,British commercial TV aired a mordantly witty six-part black comedy, "Whoops Apocalypse " -a tale about events in the week leading up to WW3. This extract from Wikipedia,captures the tone :-  The naive and highly unpopular Republican U.S. President Johnny Cyclops (an obvious Ronald Reagan parody, played by  Barry Morse ) is advised by an insane right-wing fundamentalist security advisor, And here we all are in 2018 and life is imitating art to the full, a real  President Johnny Cyclops is being advised by the likes of John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo. There was,what was commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal - the US unilaterally tore that one up.There was a summit arranged for June in Singapore between DPRK-North Korea and the US.The US has unilaterally cancelled it. In a recent scathing denunciation of the Iranian government,in the wake of the US abrogation of the nuclear deal, Pompeo tore into Iran ...

Israeli Premier Netanyahu is trying to light a few extra fuses in the Syrian imbroglio and investing an extraordinary amount of diplomatic demagoguery toward that objective.The trigger,he hopes, will be the revocation of what is commonly termed the Iran Nuclear Deal.A Heath-Robinson affair where the 5 permanent members of the UN security Council plus Germany exercise vigilance and constraints on Iran's ambition to create a nuclear arsenal. The saving grace, if indeed there is to be any in this prelude to WW3, is that,the current US President Trump's predilection for diplomatic anarchy may not on this occasion be allowed free rein.China,France,Russia and the UK,oh,and Germany,all have an intense desire to maintain the present Iran Nuclear Deal.A position and outlook that enjoys a broad spectrum of support amongst the various experts,analysts and ad-hoc international bodies who between them have a good idea as to the degree and veracity of Iran's adherence to the deal itsel...