{"id":71012,"date":"2016-03-28T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=71012"},"modified":"2016-03-27T15:19:04","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T14:19:04","slug":"americas-persian-and-arabian-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/03\/americas-persian-and-arabian-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"USA\u2019s Persian and Arabian Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometime between 460 and 450 B.C.E., Herodotus wrote The Persian Wars<\/em>, his account of the Greeks\u2019 two wars with the Persians, which spanned thirteen years.\u00a0 Even in a time when trends and events unfolded more slowly than they seem to now, that was a famously lengthy conflict.\u00a0 But the ancient Greeks and Persians have nothing on us Americans in that regard.<\/p>\n

The United States has now been engaged in a cold war with Iran \u2013 Persia \u2013 for thirty-seven years.\u00a0 It has conducted various levels of hot war in Iraq for twenty-six years.\u00a0\u00a0 It has been in combat in Afghanistan for fifteen years.\u00a0 Americans have bombed Somalia for fifteen, Libya for five, and Syria for one and a half years.\u00a0 One war has led to another.\u00a0 None has yielded any positive result and none shows any sign of doing so.<\/p>\n

The same might be said for the wars of others we Americans subsidize and supply.\u00a0 Israel\u2019s wars to subdue the Palestinians and deter other Arabs from challenging its ongoing dispossession of them are now sixty-eight-years-old \u2013 and counting.\u00a0 U.S. drones have been killing Yemenis for fourteen years, Pakistanis for twelve, and Somalis for nine.\u00a0 Saudi Arabia\u2019s bloody effort to reinstall an ousted government in Yemen is almost a year old.\u00a0 In none of these wars is an end in sight.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to put a price tag on these inconclusive misadventures.\u00a0 The unsuccessful Afghan and Iraq pacification campaigns alone have cost the United States an estimated $6 trillion in outlays and obligations.\u00a0 Over 7,000 Americans have died in combat since these wars kicked off in 2001.\u00a0 At least another 50,000 have been maimed.\u00a0 A million have filed claims for war-related disabilities.\u00a0 And well over two million Afghans, Arabs, Persians, and Somalis have perished.\u00a0 This is a great deal of sacrifice and suffering for no apparent gain in the region and continuously escalating risks to our homeland.\u00a0 Perhaps a bit of reflection is in order, followed by a change of course.<\/p>\n

It is said in this regard that before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. (That way, when you criticize them, you\u2019re a mile away, and you have their shoes.)\u00a0 In that spirit, let me offer a few thoughts as well as a question or two about America\u2019s Persian and Arabian wars.<\/p>\n

What it is that we Americans are trying to accomplish?\u00a0\u00a0 Is there no better way than warfare to protect and advance our interests?\u00a0 How can we finally end the many wars we have begun?\u00a0 On what terms should they be ended and with whom?\u00a0 At what point is enough enough?<\/p>\n

Unraveling the tangle of wars in which the United States is now engaged with or against Arabs, Berbers, Hazaras, Israelis, Kanuris, Kurds, Palestinians, Persians, Pashtuns, Somalis, Syrians, Tajiks, Tuaregs, Turkmen, Turks, and Uzbeks \u2013 as well as Alawites, Christians, Druze, Jews, secular Muslims, Salafis, Shiites, Sunnis, and Yazidis \u2013 will not be easy.\u00a0 In large measure through our involvement, their conflicts have become interwoven.\u00a0 Ending one or another of them might alter the dynamics of the region but would not by itself produce peace.<\/p>\n

That is certainly true of the longest-running of these hostilities \u2013 the struggle by Zionist settlers to displace Christian and Muslim Arabs from the Holy Land and to establish a Greater Israel [Eretz Israel] with indefinitely expandable borders.\u00a0\u00a0 This is shaping up as a tragedy with no catharsis. Israel\u2019s cruelties to Palestinian Arabs provide daily reminders of two centuries of humiliating Muslim impotence in the face of Euro-American intrusions into the realm of Islam [Dar al Islam].\u00a0\u00a0 Israel\u2019s policies have been a major driver of radicalization in Arab politics and in the popularization of terrorism as a tool of resistance to oppression and ethnic cleansing wherever it occurs in the region.<\/p>\n

Resentment of Jewish colonialism, and American support for it, is now an elemental feature of Arab and Persian politics, with much\u00a0 resonance among Muslims all over the world.\u00a0 U.S. identification with Israel and its policies has made the United States the target of Israel\u2019s burgeoning enemies.\u00a0 Peace in the Holy Land now would not soon erase these resentments, which have become deeply entrenched.<\/p>\n

More than most, Israel\u2019s ongoing wars have also become a laboratory in which ways and means of waging war are developed.\u00a0 I\u2019m not just speaking here of Israeli innovations like targeted killings, enhanced interrogation techniques, drones, and pervasive surveillance systems.\u00a0 Suicide bombing is a form of asymmetric warfare now identified with Islam.\u00a0 But it came to the Middle East only when Lebanese were unable to find any other means of raising the cost to Israel of its insolent occupation of their country.\u00a0 The technique had been invented by East Asians \u2013 Japan\u2019s kamikaze pilots and the Viet Minh resistance to French rule in Indochina \u2013 and perfected by the Tamil Tigers.\u00a0 It remains anathema to most Muslims.<\/p>\n

First used in the Middle East by the Shiites of Hezbollah, suicide bombing was then taken up by Sunni Palestinians and applied to both soldiers and civilians in Israel and the occupied territories.\u00a0 First used to strike the United States with airborne improvised explosive devices [IEDs] on September 11, 2001, suicide bombing then became an oft-used weapon in the resistance to U.S. pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0 It now routinely spearheads assaults by the so-called \u201cIslamic caliphate\u201d (or \u201cDaesh\u201d) in its savage wars on the West, in the Fertile Crescent, and in Arabia and North Africa.<\/p>\n

Suicide bombing is the poor man\u2019s precision-guided munition.\u00a0 It blows up targets of politico-military importance by using the human brain as a sophisticated guidance system and the human body as a versatile delivery mechanism for explosives.\u00a0 So far \u2013 the splendidly uniformed men and women of TSA notwithstanding \u2013 there is no reliable counter to it.<\/p>\n

The unending contention between Israelis and Arabs has also become a major factor in both Iran\u2019s regional role and its estrangement from the United States.\u00a0 Iranian support for Hezbollah and its Arab Shiite constituency during and after Israel\u2019s assaults on Lebanon has given Iran significant sway in Lebanese politics.\u00a0 Iran\u2019s anti-Israel rhetoric was particularly noteworthy during the populist presidency of Iran\u2019s version of President Donald Trump, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.\u00a0 It frightened Israelis while gaining Iran traction among Sunni Arabs dismayed by their own governments\u2019 unwillingness to take action against Israel or to break with the United States on the issue.\u00a0 Among other things, this enabled Shiite Iran to build a cooperative relationship with Hamas, a broad-based Sunni democratic movement that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni Arab autocracies as well as Israel and the United States have sought to isolate.<\/p>\n

Iran came to contemporary Baghdad as a hitchhiker on America\u2019s 2003 experiment with hit-and-run democratization, which installed a pro-Iranian Shiite government in Iraq.\u00a0 Our invasion eliminated Iraq as a balancer of Iran and enabled Iraq\u2019s Kurds to achieve their independence in all but name, thus straining our relations with Turkey.\u00a0 The so-called \u201csurge\u201d of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007 consolidated the Shiite monopoly on political power in the Arab-inhabited regions of Iraq, leaving Arab Sunnis disaffected and rebellious.\u00a0 In 2011, the smoldering sectarian warfare in Iraq spread to Syria, which \u2013 with a little help from the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and the United States \u2013 it promptly engulfed.\u00a0 Iran now presents itself as the protector of Shiite rule or rights in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen.\u00a0 Such protection is proving dangerous to the health of the protected.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s inroads in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq greatly increased anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite sentiment in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.\u00a0 The Gulf Arabs see themselves as threatened and encircled by surging Iranian influence.\u00a0 Although they have little faith in America these days, they regard continuing American estrangement from Iran as a vital strategic asset to be preserved at almost any cost.\u00a0 They would not acquiesce in the Iran nuclear deal until they received assurances that it would not open the way to Iranian-American rapprochement.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Israeli paranoia about Iran found expression in unprecedentedly brazen manipulation of U.S. politics.\u00a0 A senator wrote to the Iranian leadership urging them to reject the president as the representative of the United States in foreign affairs.\u00a0 Presidential candidates declared that, if elected, they would obey Israeli dictates and repudiate what the Obama administration, Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia have agreed with Iran.\u00a0 In these circumstances, cooperation between the United States and Iran is essentially impossible.<\/p>\n

This means that for now nothing can be built on the significant interests that the United States and Iran have in common.\u00a0 This restricts options for dealing with Islamist terrorism in the Fertile Crescent.\u00a0 It helps fuel the destructive region-wide geopolitical and religious rivalry between Iran and the Gulf Arabs.\u00a0 It reduces the prospects for peace in Syria.\u00a0 Even if refugees from the Levant did not threaten the unity of Europe, decency demands that ending the carnage there be an urgent policy objective.\u00a0 In the past five years, half of Syria\u2019s prewar population has been forced to flee their homes.\u00a0 Somewhere between 350,000 and 470,000 Syrians have been killed.<\/p>\n

The impasse in U.S. relations with Iran also complicates the prospects for stability in post-NATO Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has punted a lost war to the next administration.\u00a0 It denies the American economy a market that its European and Asian competitors are now vigorously pursuing.\u00a0 It perpetuates the rancor and mutual recriminations that require Americans to garrison the Persian Gulf at the expense of attending to strategic challenges elsewhere in Europe and Asia.\u00a0 And while a freeze in US-Iranian relations may slow the worsening of US-Arab relations, it does not halt or cure it.<\/p>\n

A parallel deterioration has taken place in US-Turkish relations.\u00a0 Turkey has joined the Gulf Arabs in seeking regime change in Syria by supporting Islamist extremists.\u00a0 It is determined to prevent the emergence of yet another Kurdish quasi-state on its southern border.\u00a0 Turkey has always been an essential partner on a uniquely long list of issues.\u00a0 Without Turkish cooperation or acquiescence, one cannot conduct policies toward Iraq, Syria, Iran, Israel, Central Asia, including Afghanistan, the Caucasus, the Black Sea countries, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans, North Africa, the EU, the Gulf Arabs, NATO, or the Islamic world and its institutions.\u00a0 Migration from the Levant has just joined that list.\u00a0 But Turkey and the United States are at cross purposes over the Kurdish role in opposing Daesh and not in agreement about what else should happen in Syria.<\/p>\n

This is as complex a skein of strife as one can imagine.\u00a0 Like the Gordian knot, the beginnings of the tangle cannot be found to unsnarl it.\u00a0 And the knot is visibly rotting, which risks releasing new horrors.<\/p>\n

What is to be done?<\/p>\n

We must begin by admitting that various projects to which we have given rhetorical, if not practical, support are now infeasible.\u00a0 The \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d in the Holy Land is first among these.\u00a0\u00a0 Israel continues to insist that it can find no partner for peace.\u00a0 In this argument, Israelis resemble no one so much as the kid who kills his parents and then appeals for sympathy on the grounds that he is an orphan.\u00a0 Under cover of the so-called \u201cpeace process,\u201d Israel has assassinated every Palestinian leader of promise \u2013 by some counts some 800 individuals over the years \u2013 while incarcerating many others and\u00a0 recruiting some to serve as kapos for the occupation.\u00a0 Guns, bombs, booby traps, poison, biological agents, and drones have ensured that there is indeed no one with the vision and political standing to agree to a further subdivision of Palestine.<\/p>\n

But, as the South African example shows, democracy in a master race cannot legitimize tyranny over other populations.\u00a0 Young Palestinians no longer have even a Bantustan to look forward to.\u00a0 Their despair has become anomie<\/em> \u2013 a collapse of social norms and constraints.\u00a0 The result is an upsurge in random violence by young Palestinians against their Jewish oppressors.<\/p>\n

American leaders spent more than four decades attempting to secure acceptance for a Jewish state in the Middle East.\u00a0 We had some success in this regard, brokering peace with Egypt in 1978 and with Jordan in 1994.\u00a0 In 2002, the Arabs offered Israel a comprehensive peace.\u00a0\u00a0 They received no reply at all.\u00a0 The price of domestic tranquility for Israel has always been an end to its land seizures and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.\u00a0 Israel has been unable to curb its appetite for Arab land.\u00a0 Now the world is no longer prepared to give Israel \u2013 or the United States \u2013 the benefit of the doubt.\u00a0 There will either be a one-state solution or escalating low-intensity conflict with increasing collateral damage to American global and regional interests.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impolitic to say so, but the United States and Israel are now seriously estranged, with little prospect of reconciliation.\u00a0 Israeli accommodations of its captive Arab population or its Arab neighbors seem less likely than ever, given the Jewish state\u2019s settler-dominated politics.\u00a0 In the\u00a0 absence of efforts by Israel to reconcile others in the Middle East to its existence, its international delegitimization will accelerate.\u00a0 The United States can no longer protect Israel from the consequences of its own behavior.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse \u2013 the interests of Israel and the United States now clash on a growing list of issues.\u00a0 Iran, the security architecture of the Persian Gulf, and the imperative of cooperation with Turkey are at the head of the list.\u00a0 But US-Israeli differences now prominently include relations with Islam, which Israel has sought to demonize, a task in which it has had enormous help from Islamist extremists.\u00a0 Absent American self-identification with Israel, the United States has nothing to gain and much to lose by allowing an establishment of religion to guide its foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Contemporary Israeli values are also increasingly at odds with those of both the United States and Jewish tradition.\u00a0 Doctrines of racial supremacy, religious intolerance, and ethnic cleansing were once very American but un-Jewish.\u00a0 They are now anathema to Americans even as they flourish in Israel.\u00a0 American Jews find it hard to overcome the tribal impulses that incline them to rally behind the Jewish state but are more and more offended by the way an aggressively expansionist Israel is redefining Judaism and its image.<\/p>\n

The partnerships of the United States with Saudi Arabia and others in the Gulf are also in increasing jeopardy, as the Gulf Arabs double down on foreign policies based on sectarian intolerance of Shi`ism as well as rivalry with Iran, the self-proclaimed protector of Shi`ites everywhere.\u00a0 Like Israeli Jews, Saudi Muslims react badly to even the most well-meant criticism by outsiders.\u00a0 They talk about their problems only to themselves, reinforcing their self-righteous self-perceptions and failing to understand the way others see them.\u00a0 (It couldn\u2019t happen here!)<\/p>\n

Islam is inherently among the most tolerant and humane of faiths.\u00a0 But Saudi Islam is intolerant of other traditions within Islam, the other Abrahamic religions, and actively hostile to faiths not rooted in Judaism like Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism, Shintoism, Yazidism, or Zoroastrianism.\u00a0 And it is adamantly opposed to secularism and secular doctrines like Confucianism.<\/p>\n

More to the point, Saudi Salafism \u2013 pejoratively labeled \u201cWahhabism\u201d abroad \u2013 is kin to the xenophobic doctrines espoused by Islamist extremists, like Daesh or al Qaeda, even if it clearly lacks the zeal for bloody massacres that is their hallmark.\u00a0 This theological affinity makes Saudi Arabia either a reluctant opponent or even clandestine collaborator with Islamist extremists or the ideal partner to combat the perverted Salafism of Daesh.\u00a0 It has been hard for either Americans or Saudis to sort out which it is. That\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

Saudi and American values never coincided.\u00a0 The European Enlightenment occurred while Arabia was remote from it and in an Islamic Reformation, inspired by Mohammed ibn `Abd al-Wahhab.\u00a0 The Saudis are Muslim originalists and profoundly anti-secular. They are not impressed by democracy as a political system \u2013 especially in its current dysfunctional state in America \u2013 and do not aspire to adopt it.\u00a0 These differences never mattered in the past because U.S. and Saudi interests coincided in so many ways.\u00a0 But they matter now.<\/p>\n

Until recently, the United States had no political or ideological agenda of its own in the Middle East.\u00a0 It was satisfied to enjoy preferred access to the region\u2019s oil and to provide the Saudis and others protection in return for this.\u00a0 A grateful Saudi Arabia had America\u2019s back on foreign policy issues affecting its region or the realm of Islam.\u00a0 On occasion, it was helpful farther afield.<\/p>\n

For decades, the shared American and Saudi obsession with countering Soviet communism sidelined differences over Israel and its policies as well as human and civil rights in the Kingdom.\u00a0 No more. \u00a0Since 9\/11, the entrenchment of U.S. Islamophobia, American unilateralism, and Saudi ambivalence about Salafi jihadism have soured the undemanding friendship of the past.<\/p>\n

Contradictions between the American and Arab political cultures were increasingly prominent even before the 21st<\/sup> century began.<\/p>\n

With the end of the Cold War, Americans felt free to insist that the price of good relations with us was to accept our deeply held conviction that Western democratic values are self-evidently universal and to demand that foreign partners act accordingly.\u00a0 This inevitably distanced the United States from conservative non-Western societies, of which\u00a0 Saudi Arabia is the epitome.\u00a0 The emergence of feminism and libertarian tolerance of a variety of sexual orientations and behavior in America has added to the mutual distaste.\u00a0 Restoring a sense of common purpose will not be easy, despite the existence of a common enemy in Daesh.<\/p>\n

American policies in the Middle East have produced a mess in which we are estranged from all the key actors \u2013 Arab, Iranian, Israeli, and Turkish \u2013 and on a different page than the Russians.\u00a0 The state of our relations with the region is symbolized by the sight of U.S. diplomats cowering behind barriers surrounding fortress embassies that resemble nothing so much as modern-day Crusader castles.\u00a0 Diplomacy is all but impossible when we must ask host governments to protect our diplomats from their people by placing our embassies under perpetual siege by police.\u00a0 The fact that other countries don\u2019t have to do this is suggestive of something.\u00a0 After so many years, it should be obvious that bombing, drone warfare, and commandos just make things worse.\u00a0 It is time for Americans to end our wars and support for the wars of others in the Middle East and to try something else.<\/p>\n

What might that be?\u00a0 Well, we might start by recognizing a few unpalatable realities.\u00a0 In the Levant, the world brought into being by Messrs. Sykes and Picot has ended.\u00a0 All of our bombers and all of our men can\u2019t put Humpty Dumpty together again.\u00a0 We and our friends in the region are going to have to accept the rise of new states within changed borders.\u00a0 Where we cannot fix things, we must at least do no harm.<\/p>\n

The Arabs have made it clear that they recognize the reality of Israel\u2019s presence in their midst and do not expect it to disappear.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear that, if Israel did indeed disappear, this would be because it did itself in, not because it was militarily overwhelmed.\u00a0 Israel has had a free ride on the United States for forty years.\u00a0 It is in denial about the ultimate consequences for it of moral self-destruction, political self-compression, and rising personal insecurity.\u00a0 Israelis will not address these perils without shock treatment.\u00a0 They need to make short-term political sacrifices to secure domestic tranquility and well-being over the long term.<\/p>\n

If Americans could muster the political will, we could easily administer the requisite tough love to Israel through selective suspensions of the unconditional UN vetoes, aid, and tax subsidies that make counterproductive behavior by the Jewish state cost-free.\u00a0 If we are politically unable to cease the enablement and creation of moral hazard for Israel, we should consider how best to minimize the damage to ourselves as Israel self-destructs.\u00a0 We should not support or appear to support Israeli policies we consider misguided.<\/p>\n

Similarly, America should restructure its relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs to be more two-sidedly collaborative.\u00a0 Like Israel, these countries have effectively declared their independence from us.\u00a0 Their continued dependence on us does not oblige us to support their policies.\u00a0 When these policies do not serve American purposes we should withhold our backing for them.<\/p>\n

Americans neither understand nor have any interest in involving ourselves in theological rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites.\u00a0 When it is in our interest to do so, we should feel free to cooperate with Iran, as we do with Israel, rather than automatically deferring to Gulf Arab (or Israeli) objections.\u00a0 Our policies in Syria are the palsied offspring of an unholy marriage of convenience between liberal interventionists and Gulf Arab rulers obsessed with deposing Bashar al-Assad, establishing Sunni dominance in Syria, and breaking Syria\u2019s alliance with Iran.<\/p>\n

But, with the exception of the Iranian angle, would these outcomes necessarily serve U.S. interests?\u00a0 Is the unconditional support of the Gulf Arabs for military dictatorship in Egypt likely to end well?\u00a0 Is the perpetuation of the fighting in Yemen something we favor?\u00a0 It is time to restructure U.S. relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Iran to reflect the challenges of the post-Sykes-Picot and Cold War eras, the need for mutual accommodation between Arabs and Persians, and the rise of Daesh.<\/p>\n

Greater flexibility in the U.S. relationship with the Gulf Arabs as well as with Iran is essential to end our cold war with Iran and our hot wars elsewhere in the region.\u00a0 It is necessary to restore a basis for a balance of power in the Persian Gulf that can relieve us of the burden of permanently garrisoning it.\u00a0 We should be looking to internationalize the burden of assuring security of access to energy supplies and freedom of navigation in the region.\u00a0 We should be using the United Nations to forge a coalition of great powers and Muslim states to contain and crush Daesh, criminalize terrorism, and build effective international structures to deal with it.<\/p>\n

It is time to cut a knot or two in the Middle East. Enough is now enough.<\/p>\n

DACOR Bacon House, Washington, DC 4 March 2016<\/em><\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 chasfreeman.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. (That way, when you criticize them, you\u2019re a mile away, and you have their shoes.) In that spirit, let me offer a few thoughts as well as a question or two. What it is that we Americans are trying to accomplish? Is there no better way than warfare to protect and advance our interests? How can we finally end the many wars we have begun? On what terms should they be ended and with whom? At what point is enough enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}