Strategic Culture Foundation | May 24, 2024 As the Iranian nation mourned the tragic death of President Ebrahim Raisi this week, the United States could not even muster a respectful offer of condolence.
The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, officially that country’s top diplomat, made a crass remark that the Iranian people would be “better off”. This as the Islamic Republic had declared five days of mourning for the late president whose funeral in the city of Mashhad was attended by millions of Iranians.
President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash along with the country’s much-respected Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and several other dignitaries who were also on board the aircraft. The fatal crash happened in treacherous weather over a mountainous region in northwest Iran as the president’s entourage returned from a visit to Azerbaijan.
Most of the world expressed shock and grief over the loss. The UN General Assembly held a minute’s silence and at the funeral, 68 nations were represented including officials from Russia and China.
The United States and Iran have been staunch adversaries for almost half a century following the Iranian revolution in 1979. Nevertheless, it is a basic matter of diplomacy and etiquette for countries to show a token of sympathy at such a time of national mourning.
The disgraceful and cheap comments about the death of Iran’s president show how inadequate Blinken is as the supposed U.S. primary diplomat. But the failure is not merely a personal matter, it epitomizes the general collapse of Washington’s political quality and international standing. The United States presumes to be a world leader but it evidently has no class. Biden, the president and Blinken’s boss, is a foul-mouthed crank who regularly insults other leaders with ignorant prejudice.
On Blinken’s insult over the Iranian president’s death, Russia’s presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed the disgust of many observers around the world when he said: “It is hard to believe that a diplomat — let alone a high-ranking official of a country such as the United States — would make such a clumsy remark, to say the least. In essence, it was an insult directed at an entire nation.”
Apart from the lack of human decency, there is a total lack of politics. Blinken’s offensive comment comes at a moment of extreme tension in the Middle East amid a genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime with support from the United States. The powder-keg situation could explode at any time into an international war engulfing the entire region. Israel and Iran have already exchanged military blows.
All diplomats worth their salt should be trying to calm tensions, not inflame them. Blinken’s contemptible insult to the Iranian people is a reckless provocation.
But such sensibility and respect are too much to expect from Blinken who has shown himself to be way out of his depth as a diplomat.
Last week, the “top diplomat” embarrassed his office by playing guitar on stage in a bar during an official visit to Kiev. Blinken was in the Ukrainian capital promising billions of dollars more in military aid to prolong a bloody and futile proxy war against Russia. Reliable estimates put the Ukrainian military death toll at over 500,000 in over two years of combat. Yet, here was Blinken strumming electric guitar with a local rock band. Even more cringe-making was his choice of song, Neil Young’s ‘Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World’. Not only was Blinken tone deaf to the horror of war, but he was oblivious to the fact that the song is an explicit condemnation of American imperialist barbarity.
How could anyone be so stupid and insensitive? That is the measure of Antony Blinken right there.
Lamentably, Blinken has a lot of dubious company in Washington. Their collective arrogance and incompetence are driving the world to calamity. It is reported this week that Blinken is among those in Washington advocating for the supply of long-range U.S. weapons to strike Russian territory. Others pushing this recipe for World War Three include Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and former State Department official Victoria Nuland.
Blinken’s blunders should have seen him sacked long ago in disgrace. He was a chief cheerleader for arming the Kiev regime long before the conflict escalated in February 2022. He along with Nuland and others was instrumental in setting the course for this proxy war that runs the risk of spiraling into a nuclear war.
During his previous posts as national security advisor to President Obama and Biden when he was vice president, Blinken endorsed the NATO “human rights” war on Libya and the “pro-democracy” proxy war for regime change in Syria. The latter involved Washington arming sectarian terror gangs – until Russia and Iran put an end to that dirty operation.
This trail of disaster chartered by Blinken should have ensured his barring from ever ascending to the prominence of Secretary of State. However, that is assuming such appointments are made based on sanity and sound foreign policy.
No, Blinken is a war criminal whose ignorant narcissism knows no bounds. He is nothing but a useful tool for American imperialist warmongering. The guitar-playing, Harvard-educated Blinken is a manikin that provides a pseudo-liberal image to cover for the barbarity of US global power.
His ineptitude is leading the world to an abysmal state of confrontation in the Middle East and between nuclear powers over Ukraine.
What’s more though is the deplorable truth that Washington is full of clones like Blinken. The level of political culture in the U.S. establishment that spawns the likes of Blinken is so putrid and prevalent, that it is difficult to envisage any quality thinkers and leaders emerging.
The degeneration of politics and diplomacy in the United States has been on a long decline much like its global power. Some of Blinken’s more recent predecessors include Mike Pompeo (“we lie and cheat all the time”) and Hillary Clinton (who gloated about the murder of Muammar Gaddafi with “we came, we conquered, he died”); Condoleezza Rice (of Iraq war and rendition torture notoriety) and Colin Powell (who told barefaced lies to the UNSC over WMD). The list of degenerates goes on.
But in Blinken’s case, he’s probably the high point – or maybe that should be the low point – of polished incompetence.
Cometh the hour of U.S. failure, cometh the man who embodies abject failure.
The Free 