The Saudi Arabia Oil Refinery Bombing: The Latest False Flag

The United States has long been itching to do Israel’s bidding and invade Iran. This desire was somewhat subdued during the administration of Barack Obama, but returned like gang-busters with the ascendance of the unstable, narcissistic Donald Trump to the U.S. throne. First was the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA); Trump and his minions apparently hoped that the economic damage resulting from this would cause the Iranian people to rise up against their own government. The U.S. would then, of course, have to invade for ‘humanitarian’ purposes.

That failed, so then the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the clown-like Nikki Haley, went on and on about Iran’s alleged nefarious dealings throughout the Middle East. Not only was any evidence of this lacking, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was inspecting Iran’s nuclear sites, and certifying Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA several times a year. Unfortunately, no one was inspecting the U.S. for compliance, because in 2018, it violated the agreement. Any while Haley was looking for any excuse to criticize Iran, she had nothing but praise for the brutal apartheid regime of Israel.

But Haley’s accusations didn’t amount to much, and she faded into obscurity, where she certainly belongs. So the U.S. tried to blame Iran for damaging two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in May of this year, and again in June. Still, this didn’t resonate with the world sufficiently for the U.S. to invade.

Iran shot down a U.S. drone flying in Iranian airspace, and again, Donald Trump and his minions when ballistic (please forgive the pun). In retaliation, Trump proclaimed that the U.S. shot down an Iranian drone, but didn’t bother to show any evidence of it, while the Iran’s government spokespeople stated that all of their drones returned on schedule.

What is an unstable, war-mongering president to do?

Well, the answer, perhaps, was to hit everyone where it hurts the most, in their pocketbooks. Enter Abqaiq. The possibility of oil supplies being disrupted might be sufficient to cause the world to act in a totally irrational manner.

As shown, this is just the latest in the long list of false flags the U.S. raises in its attempt to justify an invasion of Iran.

Is this a new concept? Hardly! We need not look very far back in history to see other examples; in fact, the entire ugly and violent history of the United States is littered with such false flags, each of them bloodier than the next. A few examples will suffice.

In early 2018, the U.S. bombed Syria to punish the government after it accused Bashar al-Assad of using poison gas on his own people. Shortly thereafter, then Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that the U.S. had no evidence that Assad had done what the U.S. bombed his country for doing. The U.S. wanted to bomb Syria, because it wasn’t rolling over and dying in its intense battle with U.S.-financed terrorists, so some additional violence needed to be perpetrated against it.

Let us go all the way back to 2002 and 2003, when then President George Bush told the world that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’, all of which threatened the very existence of the United States, if not civilization itself. The fact that much of the weaponry Iraq once had was provided to it by the U.S. wasn’t much discussed back then. But Bush and his cohorts told the U.S. and the world, from the United Nations, that something needed to be done. And while most of the U.S.’s major allies took a pass on participation in the subsequent invasion, the U.S. went forward with its ‘Shock and Awe’ (who on earth comes up with these names? And is naming an invasion even necessary) campaign against the people of Iraq. But lo and behold, no ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were ever found in Iraq’s possession. Of course, no one talks about the weapons of mass destruction that the U.S. used against Iraq.

For those who are a bit older, they may remember that the start of the Vietnam War was another significant false flag. Two U.S. destroyers patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, where they had no legitimate business to be, reported that they’d been fired upon. Within 24 hours, the ships’ captains realized that there had been no attack, just some ‘ghost’ images on the radar that falsely signaled an attack. But President Lyndon Johnson, a major war criminal if ever there was one, used this non-event to astronomically escalate U.S. troop presence in Vietnam; up to this point, U.S. soldiers were ostensibly just ‘advisers’. At least 2,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children died as a direct result of this; over 50,000 U.S. soldiers died; Cambodia and Laos were also bombed, the U.S. was nearly bankrupt by the war, students across the country fought the U.S. government, and the reputation of the U.S. was in tatters. And the goal of the people of Vietnam, the uniting of their country which the U.S. so vehemently and violently opposed, was eventually realized when the U.S. fled in defeat.

And now we have Iran firmly in the crosshairs of U.S. imperial adventurism. We see one baseless accusation by the U.S. after another, against a nation that hasn’t invaded another country since 1798. Yet the list of nations the U.S. has invaded is a mile long.

The U.S. policy of Middle East destabilization has been wildly successful, evidenced by the blood of innocents that the U.S. has shed in that part of the world. But Trump & Co. had better think twice before invading Iran; this is not an isolated, Third-World country, but a major Middle East powerhouse, with allies including Russia. U.S. militarism should tread very lightly in that part of the world.

But will Trump exercise restraint? Possibly. He has promised his base of support, for whom he will do anything, including depriving them of health care (that’s a topic for a different essay), not to get into any more wars. And with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another major war criminal, on the cusp of losing power, Trump may not be so willing to do his bidding. Trump likes ‘winners’, as he always says, and Netanyahu’s days of winning may be over.

If there were any cooler heads in the White House to prevail, one would have some hope. But relying on the whim of the self-proclaimed stable genius, who is quite patently neither, is not much to hold onto.

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Featured image: A fire boke out at the Saudi Aramco facility in the eastern city of Abqaiq on Saturday after a drone attack by Houthi rebels from Yemen. | Reuters


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Articles by: Robert Fantina

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