(Note: As we go to press, CBS News leaks that the US plans attacks against Iranian personnel and facilities in Iraq and Syria—thus avoiding the worst options for the moment by not attacking inside Iran itself. But NBC reports that attacks will continue for “weeks,” risking wider war if that report is true.)

I can rarely find much agreement with the veteran British liberal journalist Simon Tisdall, but his recent column, “Mega-Bomb Waiting to Explode in the Middle East,” warning Biden to avoid striking Iran, hit the mark.

Key points:

Direct American military retaliation against Iran itself would be a disaster. It would prolong the Gaza conflict. It would almost certainly trigger an all-out Hezbollah attack on Israel. It could turn local firefights into raging infernos in Iraq and Syria, and destabilize friendly regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf….

More than that, it would be a gift to Netanyahu, who has long urged punitive military action against Iran and whose post-October policy is one of perpetual war.

If Biden succumbs to the pressure to “Hit Iran now; Hit them hard,” as Lindsey Graham demands—with Nikki Haley—Americans are in for a bitter awakening. Fifty years after Vietnam, Americans no longer know what war is, in the sense of a war against a large, well-armed adversary with effective air defenses and other advanced military technology. (Although two years of war in Ukraine have helped some of us to wake up.)

Lunatic Senators (as Tucker Carlson called them) Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, imagine that war with Iran will only be a repeat of Iraq War I and the opening months of Iraq War II—sprinkle a few bombs on the mud huts of the natives and they’ll give up. Not so. Iran has the Russian air-defense systems which have worked so well in Ukraine. Where will Graham and Cornyn be when our planes go down? It has the advanced missile technology shown recently in simultaneous pinpoint strikes on targets in Syria and Pakistan. Iran has hypersonic missiles, which the US does not, and it is widely reported that we have no defense against them. What will Graham and Cornyn say when the first US warship is sunk?

(Parenthetically—To correct the deliberate lies of such as David Sanger of the New York Times, President Trump has not prodded Biden to military action against Iran. Indeed, Trump acted twice to prevent that war during his first term.)

What Tisdall describes as the outcome of striking Iran, is a total regional war against Israel and the United States. Since even US military power would probably be unable to protect Israel in such a war, Israel’s use of its nuclear weapon becomes a real possibility—and with it, Armageddon.

Who is pushing for this? Who could want such a thing? Admittedly, there are factions in Israel that do want a wider war. Recently, Gen. Gabi Eisenkot, retired IDF Chief of Staff and a member of the War Cabinet, revealed that Israel had planned a preemptive attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon on Oct 8, the day after the massacre, which was called off. Eisenkot said that it would have triggered a wider war. Reportedly, Israeli cabinet majorities have supported the same preemptive attack more recently, but were overruled. Their calculation is that Israel would not be able to win the resulting war—but precisely that fact would force Washington into the fight, and American arms would defeat all of Israel’s enemies.

Who is pushing Apocalypse? For those who still believe in the childish fantasy that an “Israeli lobby” controls US policy, the answer is obvious—Israel. There are those who have misattributed the war-against-everyone plans of our neoconservatives to Israel for half a century—as ridiculous as that is. They should learn better from the current deployment of the supposedly Jewish Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, which has nothing to do with Jews or Jewish interests, but only with punishing thought-crimes against the regime.

The so-called Jewish Lobby is a British Lobby. From the Balfour Declaration, through the Palestine Mandate and the UNWRA, it was London which maintained significant control both over the Zionist movement, and its Arab adversaries in the Mideast states which the British (with Paris) had largely established under Sykes-Picot. In particular, British Intelligence has manipulated the Arab-Israeli conflict for over a century, from its beginnings through today.

Hamas is the name assumed by the Muslim Brotherhood, a British Intelligence front, in Palestine, and it was Hamas’ massacre of Oct 7 which started us down this forced march to Armageddon. Now, as we stand on the brink of war with Iran, a British Intelligence faction tries to push us over that brink. Conclusion: we are dealing with an “Apocalypse Now” faction of the British Oligarchy. More to come on this.