Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares – Common Dreams Jan 19, 2026
The question is not if the US and Israel will attack Iran, but when. In the nuclear age, the US refrains from all-out war, since it can easily lead to nuclear escalation. Instead, the US and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called “hybrid warfare.”
Both the American and Israeli deep states are addicted to hybrid warfare. Acting together, the CIA, Mossad, allied military contractors and security agencies have fomented chaos across Africa and the Middle East, in a swath of hybrid wars including Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.
The shocking fact is that for more than a quarter century, the US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies have laid waste to a region of hundreds of millions of people, blocked economic development, created terror and mass refugee movements, and have nothing to show for it beyond the chaos itself. There is no security, no peace, no stable pro-US or pro-Israel alliance, only suffering. In the process, the US is also going out of its way to undermine the UN Charter, which the US itself had brought to life in the aftermath of World War II. The UN Charter makes clear that hybrid war violates the very basis of international law, which calls on countries to refrain from the use of force against other countries.
There is one beneficiary of hybrid war, and that is the military-industrial-digital complex of the US and Israel, with firms like Palantir and others profiting from their AI-supported assassination algorithms. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address of the profound danger of the military-industrial complex to our society. His warning has come to pass even more than he imagined, as it is now powered by AI, mass propaganda, and a reckless US foreign policy.
We are witnessing two simultaneous hybrid wars in recent weeks, in Venezuela and Iran. Both are long-term CIA projects that have recently escalated. Both will lead to further chaos.
The United States has long had two goals vis-à-vis Venezuela: to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt, and to overthrow Venezuela’s leftist government, in power since 1999. America’s hybrid war against Venezuela dates to 2002, when the CIA helped to support a coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez. When that failed, the US ramped up other hybrid measures, including economic sanctions, the confiscation of Venezuela’s dollar reserves, and measures to cripple Venezuela’s oil production, which in fact has collapsed. Yet despite the chaos sown by the US, the hybrid war did not bring down the government.
Trump has now escalated to bombing Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, stealing Venezuelan oil shipments, and imposing an ongoing naval blockade, which of course is a continuing act of war. It also seems likely that Trump is thereby enriching powerful pro-Zionist campaign funders who have their eyes on seizing Venezuelan oil assets. Zionist interests also have their eye on toppling the Venezuelan government, since it has long supported the Palestinian cause and maintained close relations with Iran. Netanyahu has cheered on America’s attack on Venezuela, calling it the “perfect operation.”
The United States and Israel are simultaneously escalating their ongoing hybrid war against Iran. We can expect ongoing US and Israeli subversion, air strikes, and targeted assassinations. The difference with Venezuela is that the hybrid war on Iran can easily escalate into a devastating regional war, even a global war. In fact, even US allies in the region, especially Gulf countries, have been engaged in intensive diplomatic efforts to persuade Trump to back down and avoid military action.
The war on Iran has a history even longer than the war on Venezuela. The US started to make deep trouble for Iran back in 1953, when democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil in defiance of then-called Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today’s BP). The CIA and MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax to depose Mossadegh through a mix of propaganda, street violence, and political interference. The CIA installed the Shah and backed him until 1979.
During the Shah’s rule, the CIA helped to create notorious secret police, SAVAK, that crushed dissent through surveillance, censorship, imprisonment, and torture. Eventually, this repression led to a revolution that swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Amid the revolution, students seized US hostages in Teheran when the US admitted the Shah for medical treatment, leading to fear that the US would try to reinstall him in power. The hostage crisis further poisoned the relations of the US and Iran. From 1981 onward, the US has plotted to torment Iran, and if possible, to overthrow the government. Among the countless hybrid actions the US has undertaken, the US funded Iraq in the 1980s to wage war on Iran, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but failing to topple the government.
The US-Israeli objective vis-à-vis Iran is the opposite of a negotiated settlement that would normalize Iran’s position in the international system while constraining its nuclear program. The real objective is to keep Iran economically broken, diplomatically cornered, and internally pressured. Trump has repeatedly undercut negotiations that could have led to peace, starting with his withdrawal from the 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that would have monitored Iran’s nuclear energy activities while removing US economic sanctions.
Understanding the hybrid war tactics helps to explain why Trump’s rhetoric oscillates so abruptly between threats of war and phony offers of peace. Hybrid warfare thrives on contradictions, ambiguities, and outright deceit in US intentions. Last summer, the US was supposed to have a round of negotiations with Iran on June 15, 2025, but then supported Israel’s bombing of Iran on June 13, two days before the negotiations were to take place. For this reason, signs of de-escalation in recent days should not be taken at face value. They can all too readily be followed by a direct military attack in the coming days.
The world’s best hope is that the other 191 countries of the UN aside from the US and Israel finally say no to America’s addiction to hybrid war: no to regime-change operations, no to unilateral sanctions, no to the weaponization of the dollar, and no to the repudiation of the UN Charter. The American people do not support the lawlessness of their own government, but they have a very hard time making their opposition heard. They and almost all the rest of the world want the US deep state brutality to end before it’s too late.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.
just in from a friend
ROTHSCHILDS ENGLISHMEN
wartime letters from a high level British traitor displayed at the National Archives
Secret love letters written by one of the Cambridge Five spies have been revealed for the first time.
There were more like 45 spied, and called Rothschild apostles
John Cairncross, the “fifth man” in the infamous spy ring of British traitors who passed information to Rothschild for the Soviet Union, Cairncross wrote to a former lover that he felt “subhuman” around the time he was betraying Britain. In a 1944 letter being displayed at the National Archives, he writes dotingly to ex-girlfriend Gloria Barraclough of his longing for 1937 – the year he was recruited by Rothschild for Soviet espionage.
Writing from London, Cairncross said: “Writing to you seems to have some magical effect on me, I feel much less subhuman than I’ve done since 1937.”
He added: “1937 – it seems a long way off, doesn’t it. Heaven, by comparison with the events of the past seven years, and, alas a heaven that we, like most people, didn’t fully appreciate at the time, but Victor ( Rothschild } tells me i have £60,000 in the Moscow bank.”
The spy – who worked at Bletchley Park and claimed a decrypt of the Enigma code, enabling them to win the Battle of Kursk against Germany – also told Barraclough the past four years had been “hard, exhausting [and] often depressing over selling out his countrymen”.
During the war, Cairncross passed documents through secret channels to his KGB handlers. He was known to have smuggled the decrypts out of the hut in his trousers, transferring them to his bag at the railway station.
His letter, on display at the National Archives’s new Letters exhibition from Saturday, was one of five found by Barraclough’s son following her death in 2012.
Tom Brass, 80, discovered the materials when opening his mother’s copy of Cairncross’s 1997 autobiography, The Enigma Spy, which was published two years after the spy’s death.
He said that five letters and two pictures, including one of Cairncross doing the dishes, fell from the back of the book, revealing the pair’s formerly secret relationship.
“It wasn’t a lightbulb moment,” Mr Brass explained, but added that he “put two and two together” when he saw J. Cairncross as well as the London address at Lansdowne Court, which is the same one referenced in his book.
Barraclough’s son ‘put two and two together’ when he saw J. Cairncross as well as the London address at Lansdowne Court,
Describing his mother as the “unknown woman” in Cairncross’s life, Mr Brass said: “It was clear they had a very close relationship.
“I knew of [their relationship] but not in the detail that I subsequently found out. I knew she knew him, but I didn’t know how close they were at one point and by the time I was able to ask questions, [such as] ‘where did you meet, what was your first impression of him’, she was already dead.”
Mr Brass felt that she would not have known at the time of Cairncross’s espionage, which he only confessed secretly to MI5 in 1964. as a result of defector evidence
Cairncross confided to another lover Diana Everett of his spying and how Brits were being murdered, she wrpte to Guy Bugess, Churchills lover at that time, she took her own life soon after.
Cairncross an intellectual from a poor family was jealous of the other lads at Cambridge from monied families
he also disliked that Sr Anthony Blunt had recruited almost all homosexuals
and was very ashamed over what he had done against his own countrymen
Cairncross’s treachery became public when Barrie Penrose, a dogged investigative journalist, outed the Treasury worker as the
“fifth man” in the Cambridge spy ring in 1979.
Cairncross always longed to be rich, this promise of £60,000 was never paid, none of the Cambridge traitors ever saw a penny from Rothschild, not even Kim Philby who lived in a Moscow high rise flat with little food or heating on just 3 hours a day
Winston Churchill received in total £150,000 and bank accounts in the name of Colonel Arden and A Connoly a similar amount
John Cairncross passed documents through secret channels to the KGB during the Second World War
He told the authorities of Rothschilds Operation Creada, the plan after the war to flood the UK with foreign nationals
Note that no other country or system of governance or ideology would survive against the combined might of Satan. Simply put ultimately Iran is divinely assisted and Satan is allowed to attract all the putrid rotten hearts around it like a magnet before the final epic showdown!
Iran is also the key for survival of China and Russia, so them trying to help Iran now is only a logical move as US/NATO is collectively helping Zion too. Similarly only after fall of Iran, US/Zion can swallow the rest of the world.
So far US/Zion have failed in defeating Iran despite numerous attempts and employing everything in their book. Somehow Khamenei returns back and holds Iran together even after the first couple of days of the 12 day war! Their final plan is:
US is dumping the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, the former Al-Jolani (handed over Jolan/Golan to Zion) who is now named Ahmad Al Shara and leads Syria is 100% in the US/Zion plan. Turkey under Erdogan is pathetic and the US carrot and stick is working… Erdogan is interested in destruction of Kurds, in particular Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF or QASAD قسد) which were always supported by US and used as pawns and soon are to be backstabbed by their own masters. Many ISIS members were freed in recent clashes between SDF and Jolani forces. There is a massive military buildup in Jordan that is ultimately going to attack Iraq and from there they plan to attack Iran. This is the land attack that US has always wanted but could not make it happen. The final external line of defense for Iran is the Iraqi Shia PMF (الحشد الشعبي). Iran is very powerful in the Persian Gulf and realistically enemies of Iran can’t even approach the shore to deploy forces. In the east there are factions of the Taliban and and the US backed Baluch terrorists, however the strongest point for a US land attack is without a doubt the western side of Iran. Of course they all have some experience of fighting against Iran Syria but this time it will be huge in scope, in fact enemies of Iran are even re-visiting Iran’s famous land operations against Saddam decades ago.
And as I am writing this, destiny calls and I am preparing to join the final glorious fight as well! The final phase of the war could commence/erupt perhaps in this month of Ramadan!
“the US and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns.” …. Jewry has been doing the same thing to the Jewnited States, and probably your cuntry too, for over 100 years….
stephen welbeck @
amazing i had heard of john cairncross
what a filthy bastard traitor
thankyou