YEREVAN—Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has called for level heads to prevail as tensions in the region flared over the death of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in last week’s US airstrike. Broadcasting on Facebook Live during a hike in the Armenian mountains, the Prime Minister stressed the importance of Armenia avoiding entanglement on either side of a potential escalation between the two countries. “Our message is for our partners of Iran and the United States to refrain fr
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Good and objective report by Raffi.
Armenia is caught between a rock and a hard place. A very sensitive position.
Iran is an important ally to Armenia. An important border partner economically and politically.
On the other hand, Armenia has been trying to improve its ties with the US.
Pashinian’s call to de-escalate tensions is politically savvy; however, being a small country how much influence can it have?
May be staying neutral is the best course. There is too much at stake.
Vart Adjemian
There will be no dialogue or peace between Iran and the US. The US will not stop going after Iran until there is regime change. Best for Armenia to still call for dialogue and stay neutral.
With Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq (for now) and the allies for hire Turkey, it is doubtful Armenia will be needed for military purposes. If anything, they may need to be ready to receive refugees from Iran if there is serious military action.
I would not call extensive economic ties with Iran, in addition to expressing condolences, while ignoring President Trump, as being “neutral”. When you sleep with the Devil, don’t be surprised when you get burned.
US policy in the Middle East has long been the product of Israel and the Jewish lobby.
They basically control US policy, in league with those ridiculous pro-Israel “evangelicals.”
The latter are more Jewish than Christian. They’re more Israeli than American.
Their 1st loyalty is not to America. They should register as foreign agents under FARA.
Check this out: https://www.cufi.org/ (“Christians” United for Israel).
And don’t be fooled: Israel is just waiting for a change in leadership in Turkey to
become pro-Turkish once more. In reality, except for an occasional outburst
against Turkey, most Jews and Israel have never stopped being pro-Turkish.
And the Jewish lobby is still anti-Armenian. Don’t be naive.
To be certain, CUFI director John Hagee considers Hitler a divine emissary whose duty was to force the Jews back to Israel. No surprise that Trump sent him and Robert Jeffress (another Jew-hater) to oversee the opening of the new embassy in Jerusalem.
The christo-fascists want WWIII to happen to bring about their Buybull-inspired fantasy of Jesus returning.
It’s also worth noting that it’s been Jews (Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Amy Goodman, Sarah Silverman) who have spoken up the most forcefully for the Palestinians.
At this point I don’t know whether civilization’s end will come from global warming or a nuclear holocaust brought about by the overgrown Oompa Loompa.
The assassination of general Soleimani may have been unexpected by Iran, but it seems to me the subsequent events were all done with prearranged agreements. The US tried to call Iran’s bluff, and Iran resolved to retaliate no matter what, but because Iran doesn’t want a war (and neither does Trump himself) the two parties agreed to diffuse the situation in a way where “both parties would save face”.
Trump is under orders and obligation to Jewish-Israeli Zionist billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson (who pretty much funded Trump’s entire campaign). Thus Trump did his part in ordering the assassination of a high-level official of Iran to the (temporary) satisfaction of the Israelis and Israel-Firsters operating out of the USA. However, because the assassination was done in Iraq and not Iran, the latter got caught between a rock and a hard place.
In order to respond to this aggression by the US, the leaders of Iran had no other choice but to announce their intent to retaliate. If they did not take this route, the people of Iran would likely lose all respect for the government, which in turn would result in a lot of instability for the country, possibly leading to “regime change”.
With all this said, Iran also did not want to escalate anything while retaliating, thus most likely the US was warned of the Iranian missile strikes on the Iraqi military base which also hosted the American military. No Americans died in the strikes while the Iranian missiles showed a high degree of accuracy – that is very telling.
However, Iran also met one of its objectives in this military engagement with the US: it showed that it’s missiles are in fact very capable of striking American military interests in the region including Israel, with the potential of causing massive damage. Had Iran’s missiles randomly landed in the deserts (similar to the toy rockets Hamas supposedly sends against Israel), they would have become the laughing stock of the world. But now the US knows definitively that Iran has very accurate ballistic missiles which it will not hesitate to use in a full scale war.
At any rate that is how I came to view this conflict, and the reason why everything got quickly diffused, at least for the time being.