US–Israel manoeuvring over Gaza is already widening the conflict. As Sudan burns and propaganda intensifies, Iran may be the next target — with Australia again at risk of being drawn in.

The ‘Board of Peace’ in Gaza that the US and Israel got the UN Security Council to agree on will be anything but that. And the Palestinian Authority went along with it. Now watch the Zionists’ war elevator as it moves up another level: Iran.

Before that, however, we have Sudan. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) surprised President Trump by asking for US intervention on behalf of Saudi Arabia’s neighbour. Trump, calling MBS “your Majesty”, quickly promised to help the Saudis, Egyptians and others. They oppose the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), paramilitary fighters who control the western half Sudan. In the conflict that began long before Israel’s current war, even more civilians have been killed and displaced than in Gaza. The RSF are reported since April 2023 to be responsible for mass atrocities, using weapons supplied by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose close military ties to the US and Australia are little reported.

The confusion over Sudan challenges Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize aspirations. Ending the war there would be a greater contribution to peace than what the US president has already achieved, MBS flatteringly told his host, without providing a single example of Trump’s successes. He didn’t mention Trump’s accurately renamed Department of War, nor did he recall that since the mid-1990s – as Wesley Clark details in Winning Modern Wars – Sudan has been on the Pentagon’s list of seven middle eastern countries to be destabilised.

Of those, the last nation standing is Iran – the only neighbour of Israel that is a potential nuclear rival. The US and Israel waged a 12-day war in June that killed some 1000 civilians and destroyed much of Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity.

That country became an obsession for President Jimmy Carter after Iran, under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, took captive the US ambassador along with 52 American diplomats and citizens in Tehran. Americans failed to connect the embassy siege to the hospitality the US provided to the exiled Shah of Iran and his family. Most forgot the CIA coup d’état in 1953 that overthrew Iran’s first and only elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, and prevented him nationalising Iran’s oil industry, then dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Carter, his predecessors and successors also failed to observe that when Iran lights a fuse of revenge, it may smoulder for years, with an eventual explosion, or none. Real revenge for Trump’s assassination in 2021 of Iran’s General Soleimani may still come.

When American neo-conservative Richard Perle and his Jewish-American colleagues in 1996 wrote Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm, they proposed seizing a strategic initiative against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as “the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon” against Israel. Ten years later President George W Bush asserted that Iran’s stated objective was to destroy Israel, and that the US would “use military might to protect our ally.”

Later US presidents responded to even more of Israel’s demands. By 2010 the relationship became what Canadian author Greg Felton compared to a host organism and a parasite that feeds on it. What he calls the US-Israel “junta” had decades earlier decided to ostracise, attack, and expel the Ba’ath government in Syria for its support of Hezbollah in Lebanon. That happened in 2023 after a sustained propaganda onslaught, and Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia. The US replaced him with an Islamist group led by a formerly designated terrorist, who has changed his name. The US million-dollar bounty for the capture of Ahmed al-Sharaa is a thing of the past.

President Trump, who claims he hates wars, boasted that he was in charge of the June attack, while Iran promised to pursue accountability and compensation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Israel had taken unilateral action to defend itself, without allowing the same right to Iran. That again showed the capacity of the US and Israel – both of which had already killed numerous senior Iranian and Hezbollah leaders – to commit war crimes with impunity, and their determination to go on doing it, keeping Israel the only nuclear-armed state in the region.

The US and Israel, soon to be freed of the ‘distraction’ of the Palestinian genocide, have for years been fuelling the ta’amulah and hasbara propaganda machine against the Ayatollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that they and Australia designate as ‘terrorist’.

Loyal to friends and allies, ABC Radio National recently broadcast a non-stop tirade against Iran by an American Irano-phobe, unchallenged by Sally Sara. If that is a portent of more to come, we can expect reiterations about the brutality of the Iranian morality police and their prison system. We will be reminded that Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s close association with Israel resulted in her being accused of espionage in 2018 and jailed for 18 months until a prisoner-swap with Iranians in Thailand was organised with Israeli participation.

Compare that with the Australian government expelling the Iranian ambassador in August, following an unspecific allegation by ASIO that an unnamed Iranian somewhere had organised a series of anti-semitic incidents in Sydney and Melbourne last December. These, said Lydia Khalil of the Lowy Institute, were orchestrated by the ‘terrorist’ IRGC. She added that Iranian agents were harassing the diaspora community in Australia, although police in New South Wales have been hesitant about identifying the motives and motivators of these events.

Progressively, Australia is being softened up by Israeli propaganda for war against Iran, in which US intelligence operations in Pine Gap and Northwest Cape will involve and implicate us. In 2024, the US used both Australian airspace and Cairns airport to facilitate air strikes on  Yemen. The same could happen if the US and Israel again invade Iran. The Albanese Government knows that this is in prospect. Having not opposed Israel and the US in their 12-day war on Iran, Australia is likely to support the next round, for whatever reason.

The pretext for war will be Israel’s claims of self-defence against Hamas or Hezbollah ‘terrorists’ in Palestine, the West Bank, Lebanon, or Yemen. In reality, it will be about preserving Israel’s territorial ambitions and its monopoly on nuclear weapons.

It will not secure Trump a peace prize, but will confirm him as the American host to the Israeli parasite. If Australia is involved as their satrap, we will compound our complicity in their war crimes.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

Please support Pearls and Irritations with your tax deductible donation

This year, Pearls and Irritations has again proven that independent media has never been more essential.

The integrity of our media matters - please support Pearls and Irritations

For the next month you can make a tax deductible donation through the Australian Cultural Fund

Please click here to add your donation.