In May, the Trump administration shifted gear and embarked on a policy of what can only be called military aggression by sending warships and B-52 nuclear-capable bombers to the Persian Gulf, purportedly to "defend" against alleged though unsubstantiated Iranian security threats.
For the past two months there have been a series of sabotage incidents against commercial shipping which the US has blamed on Iran. Iran denies any involvement and has instead speculated that the incidents are being orchestrated by malign forces to incriminate Tehran.
The seizure of the Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar earlier this month by British commandos fits into the same pattern of deliberate provocation.
So when Britain's Jeremy Hunt gets on his high horse of legal probity and righteousness, the hubris is way too much to stomach.
Washington and London have said in public that they don't want a war with Iran. But all other signs suggest that war is something they are prepared to wage. Maybe they expect that the display of military power and bragging about it will be enough to make Iran cower and beg for mercy. That, in short, is state terrorism.
But Iran is nobody's fool nor play thing, as its leaders have time and again warned. Tehran says that the US and Britain may start a war, but it will be Iran that "finishes it."
There is no doubt Iran's military defenses are formidable and its missiles could dispatch American and British warships to a watery grave.
Then we are in extremely red-alert geopolitical territory where military conflict could explode into a regional war and even world war. With the Americans and their British bulldog getting a bloody nose, the truly worrying thing is that their extreme arrogance will tempt them to salvage their disaster with the unthinkable nuclear weapons.
Hubris before the fall could be a fall involving just the corrupt American and British rogue regimes. But awful to contemplate is the fall might also include vast numbers of innocent people, or even the planet as we know it.
One thing seems irrefutable, however. The American and British criminal bullying towards Iran and the rest of the world has to stop. The world can no longer afford to tolerate their extreme lawlessness.
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