Promoting War with Iran: America’s Jaw-Dropping Hypocrisy

This is all about Israel, pure and simple. Iran poses no existential threat to the United States, nor to Israel, irrespective of the hyperbolic rhetoric of President Ahmadinejad. Iran doesn’t have nukes. It’s apparently no where near acquiring them, hyped up, politicized, factually-incoherent IEAE Report notwithstanding. Israel and the US have been saying Iran is almost at break-out capacity for over 12 years. God forbid the media point this inconvenient truth out. Even Israel’s defense minister says Iran won’t attack Israel even if they had nukes. Attacking Israel would be suicidal and Iran’s government knows it. Israel has over 200 nuclear weapons with first and second strike capability- if Iran launched an attack they would be dust in a matter of hours. Former Israeli Mossad and IDF chiefs have come out saying that attacking Iran would have disastrous consequences for not only Israel, but the whole Middle East (and US). But hey, lets only listen to them when they want to blow shit up.

The US and Israel have been invading Middle Eastern nations for decades and what countries has Iran invaded, bombed and occupied recently? Oh, that’s right, not a single one. And which country overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953? Oh, yes, that would be the United States (with the help of our British friends). We’ve created our own Iran problem with our covert actions in that country. From Wiki:

In a review of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, historian Michael Beschloss wrote, “Mr. Weiner argues that a bad C.I.A. track record has encouraged many of our gravest contemporary problems… A generation of Iranians grew up knowing that the C.I.A. had installed the shah,” Mr. Weiner notes. “In time, the chaos that the agency had created in the streets of Tehran would return to haunt the United States.”

The administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower considered the coup a success, but, given its blowback, that opinion is no longer generally held, because of its “haunting and terrible legacy”. In 2000, Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, said that intervention by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Iran was a setback for democratic government.] The coup d’état was “a critical event in post-war world history” that destroyed Iran’s secular parliamentary democracy, by re-installing the monarchy of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as an authoritarian ruler.The coup is widely believed to have significantly contributed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which deposed the pro-Western Shah and replaced the monarchy with an anti-Western Islamic Republic.

“For many Iranians, the coup demonstrated duplicity by the United States, which presented itself as a defender of freedom but did not hesitate to use underhanded methods to overthrow a democratically elected government to suit its own economic and strategic interests”, the Agence France-Presse reported.

See also here.

To listen to the politicians, media and pundits, you would think Iranians just all woke up one day and decided to hate the US and Israel. The history of all of this is never mentioned because we refuse to accept any responsibility for the consequences of our foreign and military policy in the region.

Speaking of aggressive acts against sovereign nations, whose nuclear scientists have been assassinated with stunning regularity recently? Whose military base exploded the other last month? Oh yeah, that would be Iran. Has Iran retaliated by attacking Israel or the US? No.

Who is the aggressor nation again?

Despite our none-too-subtle acts of war against a sovereign nation, Iran is the country that has demonstrated the most restraint in all of this. In addition, lets not forget Iran has the largest Jewish community in the region outside of Israel. And yet Iran hasn’t moved to “wipe them off the map” of Iran. Interesting, that.

What the US and Israel are concerned about is Iran becoming a regional hegemon- a position the US and Israel currently occupy in the region. That’s it, folks. We simply don’t want Iran to have any influence in the region. It apparently never occurred to the US, Israel or the US media that perhaps it was actually Israel that started a nuclear arms race in the region? No, instead we never mention those nukes and pretend they don’t exist. The US will continue to support tin-pot (non-Shia), violent, repressive, human-rights-abusing dictatorships in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia etc. in order to diminish Iran’s power in the region. We don’t care how many civilians Bahrain or Saudi Arabia tortures or imprisons so long as they do our bidding in the region. That’s why it’s ludicrous for the administration, the media and commentators to play the human rights card with respect to Iran. Since when has the US taken an interest in the human rights of Muslims? Give me a break.

Here’s one of former Ambassador Marc Ginsberg’s weekly Likudnik, fear-mongering diatribes over at HuffPo:

The atomic ayatollahs are about to reach the end of the road in their showdown with the west. This moment of reckoning has come far more quickly than anyone had contemplated.

What now to do?

“The toughest sanctions on Iran ever” (President Obama’s words) had one goal: namely, to force Iran to end its illegal nuclear program. Even by its own admission, sanctions have stung, but have not deterred Tehran. In other words, existing economic sanctions have failed.

So while the Obama administration deserves high marks for constructing an innovative and biting sanctions regime, the easy part is over. The president is not doing himself any service by patting himself on the back for the sanctions the U.S. has inflicted on Iran. It has the air of the old adage “but for the patient dying, the operation was a complete success!”

And as the clock ticks to midnight, the administration has developed a bad case of cold feet, contesting congressional calls to impose financial sanctions on Iran’s central bank, which would have the effect of preventing Iran from receiving income from its principal oil customers; namely India and South Korea.

Its cause for hesitation: the White House is concerned that the consequence of this sanction would cause the price of oil to escalate in an election year because Iran — the world’s third largest oil exporter — would be unable to receive payment for its oil, and would cut its exports inducing global prices to spike. It is not an unreasonable concern given the pain Americans already feel at the pump.

[snip]

ast week’s “accidental” explosion which destroyed one of Iran’s largest solid-fuel missile construction bases was a gift that may keep on giving. It not only killed a key Revolutionary Guard commander in charge of missile solid fuel rocket development, the explosion also compels Iran to rely more on liquid fuel missiles that are easier to detect on the ground via satellite surveillance.

The escalating use of stealth drones conducting surveillance above Iran is an indication that the administration is not reluctant to push the covert envelope. The question is what to do with the treasure trove of data the drone surveillance program yielded?

Accidents do happen. Bigger “accidents” are needed. Rather than relying further on economic sanctions, we need a more effective “accidents regime” that may do what economic sanctions have failed to do. Of course, Iran has demonstrated a huge tolerance for international isolation and economic pain. There is no assurance that escalating covert action will achieve a better outcome than economic sanctions… but its worth the risk given the stakes involved.

Imagine if Iran started targeting the U.S. with “bigger accidents”- we wouldn’t tolerate it for once second- it would be a per se act of war. But apparently it’s ok to do this to a country we don’t like, never mind international law, all the while claiming it’s Iran that’s the aggressor who meddles in other nation’s affairs. Incredible.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the U.S.’ Orwellian double-speak with respect to Iran:

The U.S. has long had Iran virtually encircled as a result of the American occupation of Afghanistan on Iran’s Eastern border, its invasion of Iraq on its Western border, its NATO ally Turkey hovering on Iran’s Northwestern border, some degree of military relationship with Turkmenistan on Iran’s Northeastern border, and multiple U.S. client states sitting right across the Persian Gulf (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, where the massive U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed). Additionally, some combination of the U.S. and Israel has bombarded Iran with multiple acts of war over the last year, including explosions on Iranian soil, the murder of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists (in which even one of their wives was shot), and sophisticated cyberattacks. Meanwhile, top American political officials from both parties are actively demanding that an Iranian revolutionary cult be removed from the list of Terrorist organizations (just coincidentally, they’re all on the cult’s payroll). In the past decade, the U.S. and/or Israel have invaded, air attacked, and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (to say nothing of the creation of a worldwide torture regime, a system of “black site” prisons around the world to which people were disappeared, and a due-process-free detention camp in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean where many people remain encaged for almost a full decade without charges). During this same time period, Iran has not invaded, occupied or air attacked anyone. Iran, to be sure, is domestically oppressive, but no more so — and in many cases less — than the multiple regimes funded, armed and otherwise propped up by the U.S. during this period. Those are all just facts.

But — despite all of these facts — all Serious people in the U.S. know that Iran is the Aggressor, the Modern Nazis, a True Menace, while the U.S. and Israel are its innocent peace-loving victims.

BTW, General Wes Clark warned us all about the motives of the neocons when it came to the Middle East. Read about it here. Also see how the hawkish U.S. mainstream media is repeating the same mindless fear-mongering about Iran it sold us in the run-up to the Iraq War. Never mind they were all wrong.