Thomas Wictor

Son of a gun! I was right: The Iran nuclear deal is indeed the greatest deception operation in history. Saudi Arabia has just confirmed it. Though the Saudis didn’t come right out and say so, they may as well have. That’s why I’m writing about it. The Iranians know what’s coming, but they’re in denial.

I’ve seen this terminal panic firsthand; on a macro scale, Josef Stalin fell into an identical paralysis when the Nazis invaded Russia on June 22, 1941.

Stalin had been warned that the invasion was coming, but he refused to believe it. The Soviet Union was caught completely by surprise and suffered massive losses for the next four months while Stalin sat at his desk, doodling. If Hitler hadn’t been even more delusional than Stalin, the Soviets would’ve been defeated. The overconfident Nazis didn’t bring along winter gear. They paid for their arrogance with their lives.

So: Here’s the proof that I was right about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) being the most audacious deception operation in the history of warfare.

The Saudis Reply to Iran’s Rising Danger

An influential Saudi former military commander on making common cause with Israel and warming toward Russia as the U.S. backs away.

[The Saudis have] the sense that, in its pursuit of a nuclear accommodation with Tehran, America is tilting away from its traditional Middle East allies and toward Iran’s ayatollahs. For these Arab states, the new Washington dispensation means forging security arrangements that a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable. Perhaps the most astonishing of these developments is the nascent alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces, has spearheaded Riyadh’s outreach to Jerusalem. He made history in June when he appeared on a panel in Washington, D.C., with Dore Gold, the newly appointed director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

At that event, Gen. Eshki outlined a vision for the Middle East that included Arab-Israeli peace, regime change in Tehran, democracy in the Arab world and the creation of a Kurdish state. And while Gen. Eshki says his outreach to the Israelis is a purely private enterprise, it hasn’t been interpreted that way in the region, in large part because he is a prominent and well-connected figure in the Saudi security establishment.

Well, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. General Eshki couldn’t be doing this unless the Saudi government approved.

Much of what General Eshki says in his interview is an entirely necessary smokescreen. The Middle East isn’t yet ready for what’s actually happening. Reformers have to be extremely careful. What I’ll do in this post is concentrate on the evidence of this stunning deception.

First, the motivation for the entire years-long operation.

“The main project between me and Dore Gold is to bring peace between Arab countries and Israel,” he says. “This is personal, but my government knows about the project. My government isn’t against it, because we need peace. For that reason, I found Dore Gold. He likes his country. I like my country. We need to profit from each other.” Jerusalem and Riyadh, he says, are two powers that “don’t want trouble in the region.”

That’s it. They’re sick of war. Also, the Arabs are mortified. I hear from them, and they’re appalled that their ancient cultures have produced implacable monsters who revel in butchery. They sincerely want it to stop.

“Israel is thinking first of all to destroy Hezbollah, to solve the problem with Hezbollah. After that they can attack Iran.”

The Israelis have completed their training for this stage of the conflict. Their plan is to evacuate all 1.5 million Lebanese civilians south of the Litani River (red arrow) within twenty-four hours.

Then an air and ground campaign will destroy Hezbollah once and for all. People stupidly think that Hezbollah won the Second Lebanon War of 2006. Well, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah sure doesn’t sound like a victor.

Hezbollah would not have abducted two Israel Defense Forces soldiers on July 12 had it known that the action would lead to war in Lebanon, the movement’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview on Lebanon’s NTV Sunday.

“We did not think that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not,” he said.

Nasrallah also said he did not believe there would be a second round of fighting with Israel, and stated that Hezbollah would adhere to the cease-fire despite what he called Israeli provocation.

Back to General Eshki.

“Now the Storm in Yemen gave a lesson to Hezbollah and all the other [proxies] of Iran that Iran is a paper tiger,” Gen. Eshki says. “They couldn’t support the Houthis in Yemen. They couldn’t bring one plane to Yemen. For that reason, the Houthis now are talking bad against Iran on social media.”

The Islamic Republic’s imperial ambitions in the region will ultimately sound its own death knell, the general thinks. “I told the Iranians when I was there,” Gen. Eshki says. “I told [Deputy Foreign Minister Amir Hossein] Abdollahian: ‘Iran will destroy itself. If you try to revive empire, many other nationalities will ask for independence, like Azeris, like Arabs, like Turkmen, like the Baluch, like the Kurds.’ ”

He’s absolutely right. Iran has failed miserably in Yemen, and everybody has had enough of the mullahs. They’ve worn out their welcome.

And now the best part.

Riyadh and the Kremlin may now work together to stabilize Syria.

“We have to concentrate to solve the problem” in Syria, the general says. “But we don’t like Assad to stay. Because the people in Syria don’t want him to stay.”

Now the Kremlin is gradually coming around to Riyadh’s view of the conflict. “Russia is a great country,” he says, “but they don’t like to change their promises” to allies—in contrast to you-know-who. “Russia supported by weapons Iran and Assad in the civil war in Syria. But now Russia believes, has been convinced, that they are not in the right path. Saudi Arabia needs Russia in the Middle East, not to destabilize countries but to be a friend.”

I can prove to you that this isn’t just words. On June 6, 2015, Russia and Egypt held their first-ever joint naval exercises. Both nations said that this was defensive training, but the Russians sent the Alexander Shabalin, a large landing ship (LLS).

An LLS is used for one thing and one thing only: an offensive amphibious landing. Exercise Friendship Bridge 2015 was a rehearsal. Sometime between June 8 and June 24, 2015, the Saudis built a temporary port on Little Aden (red arrow).

They landed 1500 Yemeni troops equipped with 170 Oshkosh M-ATV mine resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs). Here’s how big this particular MRAP is.

The Saudi navy has no amphibious landing craft, and the United Arab Emirates Navy has five landing craft tank (LCTs), each of which can hold maybe six MRAPs.

While it’s possible that the Emiratis made multiple landings, that would be extremely risky and time consuming. I think it’s absolutely clear that the Russians supplied their LLSs so that massive amphibious landings could be carried out quickly.

On July 14, 2015, another 140 MRAPs carrying 900 troops fought their way out of Little Aden, and then on August 3, hundreds of Emirati main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, MRAPs, armored cars, mortar carriers, and self-propelled artillery pieces followed the breakout of two weeks earlier.

We’re talking maybe 1000 armored vehicles, some of them huge.

The Russians had to have landed them, which is why there’s no video or photos.

Israel is also wooing Putin. On April 2, 2015, a Russian Air Force Antonov AN-124—the largest cargo plane in the world—was photographed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

The Russians were picking up something, probably new technology to help them extract shale oil and liquid natural gas (LNG) more cheaply.

Back to General Eshki.

He believes stabilizing the region will require a “Marshall-style project to rebuild” Syria and Yemen, a cause he personally promotes.

Such a project is the only permanent antidote to the Islamist extremism of groups like Islamic State. Using the Arabic term for the group, Daesh, the general says that its terrorism wouldn’t be possible in a country “if that country is not destabilized, if it has equity. When Syria became destabilized, Daesh came to Syria. When the government in Iraq had so much corruption and pushed the Sunni out, Daesh came to Iraq quickly. If Iraq became stabilized and strong, Daesh wouldn’t be in Iraq or in Syria.”

And contrary to fashion, Gen. Eshki still talks about democratizing the Middle East. “We have in the Gulf many problems,” he says. “We need more reform. We need more democracy in that place,” albeit democracy inflected by Islamic law. “We can’t conquer the terrorists just with weapons and security acts, but also by justice inside of the country.” He even imagines a federal future for the Arab states of the Persian Gulf region inspired by the U.S. Constitution.

What do the Saudis plan to do about the Islamic State?

“I believe Daesh will like Pac Man eat all the terrorists until it becomes one big terrorist. Then we can destroy them.”

But WHY is President Obama going along with all this? The answer is so simple that it eluded me.

America and Saudi Arabia are still strong allies, he says, but “the United States is trying to move from the Middle East to the Far East and the Pacific Ocean. The United States doesn’t like anymore to be involved in the Middle East, but to support the Middle East.”

Of course! The president didn’t want the responsibility of waging war on Iran, its proxies, the Islamic State, and al-Qaeda, so he authorized arming and training Arab forces to do it instead. Not only Arab forces: I discovered tonight that Senegal created the secretive Special Forces on April 8, 2010. Almost no information is available, but it appears to be a battalion-sized unit of 500 to 800 men. So far I’ve found only one photo of Senegalese Special Forces.

They’re speaking with a member of the United States Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC). The Senegalese are a warrior culture; their operators are some of the most highly trained in the world. We flew them to Stuttgart, Germany, for weeks of training!

I’m sure that these operators are among the 2100 Senegalese troops sent to Saudi Arabia on May 4, 2015. They’re the men doing the fighting for which the US and most of Europe no longer have the stomach.

Everything I surmised is true. This Air France Airbus A380 flying over my house on the JANET route was full of Arab and Israeli troops headed to desert sites to rehearse the attack on Iran.

Though my theory sounded insane, the operation is real! The US, the UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany are all in on it.

I mentioned before that I’ve seen lethal denial firsthand. After my father died on February 23, 2013, we found in his medical records that he’d been told of his osteosarcoma—bone cancer—five years earlier. He did absolutely nothing about it. If he’d dealt with his problem, he’d still be alive. Instead, he hid his massive tumor from us, and he bought enormous underwear.

His plan was to accommodate the tumor in his middle with clothing that had bigger and bigger waist sizes.

Well, he died. The Iranian mullahs are headed in the same direction. After they’re gone, the region will be a better place, and—against all odds—it looks like the world is coming together in the name of improvement, not destruction.

Color me amazed. But very grateful.