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Why Iran?

Published by marco on

Why Iran? Why, why, why are we hammering on Iran again? Which countries have they attacked? Which countries have they threatened? And don’t say Israel, because that little tidbit is a mistranslation bordering on a lie. The NIE has, for the second time in a decade, come out and conclusively said that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. This despite the fact that doing this is pretty much career suicide for all involved in the report. Iran just sealed a deal to deposit about half of its already enriched uranium (all the way up to 20%! Ooooh! When weapons-grade is 90%) in Turkey—a NATO ally of the U.S.—for safekeeping. What more does a country have to do?

Capitulate, probably.

The U.S. and Israel are interested only in regime change in Iran (again! Remember Mossadegh?) just as they were in Iraq. It’s pathological for them. It’s pathetic that the U.S. is skipping happily down the same road they so recently trod toward Baghdad—and to Saigon before that.

Though in this case, it’s the peoples of other countries who are doomed to repeat histories that Americans can’t be bothered to learn or remember.

And the U.S. is still in Iraq.

And in Afghanistan as well.

Those wars are going so swimmingly and are so moral and good, why not do some more?

Drone attacks in Pakistan sound useful and noble.

It’s time to clean up the mess in Iran.

After all, Europe’s too chickenshit to do it.

After all, Iran is evil.

Everyone knows it.

Just read the papers.

Just watch the news.

Let the context-free and largely fact-free propaganda wash over you.

Bask in it.

Glory in it.

Then the cartoon below will make as much sense to you as it does to its author, John Sherffius.

Just days after Iran agreed to ship half of its enriched uranium—which enrichment level makes it completely unusable for weapons, but wholly appropriate for medical use—the U.S. managed to hammer through more sanctions against Iran, with Brazil and Turkey voting “no” and Lebanon abstaining.

The sanctions are to stem the imminent nuclear threat in Iran. Sanctions are largely seen in the West as a humane way of forcing regimes to clean up their acts or at least force the populace to overthrow a regime that is subjecting it to sanctions. This is complete and utter bullshit.

Sanctions only harm the innocent. They strengthen the regime in charge. The populace tends to support their regime—brutal though it may be—against the foreigners imposing the sanctions. This is logical. The inability of the western intelligentsia to accept this is an indication of a nearly perfectly myopic stupidity or a criminal lack of ethics. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State of the U.S. is, naturally, a huge fan of sanctions.

What will Iran do? To date, they have been remarkably—one could say naïvely—patient with the West. They are the most compliant—the most inspected anyway—signatories to the NPT on the planet. The U.S. is a signatory, but completely non-compliant as they, in signing the treaty, promised to reduce their nuclear stockpiles to zero.[1]

Israel is not an NPT signatory; neither are North Korea, Pakistan and India. All of those nations came by their nuclear weapons illicitly (against other international agreements that those countries had made). Now that they have them, they are counted as members of the nuclear family and are granted favored status as allies of the U.S.

Iraq had no nuclear weapons; it was invaded and has been largely destroyed. It is unlikely that it will ever rise back to the level it enjoyed under even Saddam Hussein. It will likely fester in twilight as Afghanistan has for decades.

What’s the object lesson here?

Develop nukes as quickly as you can or you will be invaded and have all of your resources taken away and parceled out to large, multinational—but largely U.S.—concerns.

The U.S. has nukes; Israel has nukes; Iran does not have nukes. But Iran gets sanctions for the weapons it does not have. The Western nations that voted for this are completely unhinged from reality; they are building their own narrative as they always do, pursuing their own short-sighted goals as they always do and damning millions of shadowy foreigners to lives of abject misery as they always do.

An attack will likely follow, with Israel leading the way, opening a minor skirmish into an all-out war, with the U.S. forced to come in to help out its “ally”.[2] Though Turkey is in NATO and an official ally of the U.S., it’s opinion will count for naught, as usual.


[1] Whether you agree that this is a worthwhile goal doesn’t matter. The fact remains that the U.S. did sign the NPT and is not in compliance. That the U.S. media regularly accuses Iran of being non-compliant would be hilariously ironic were it not so f&@king dangerously moronic.
[2] Ally is in quotes because Israel and the U.S. do not actually have a treaty with one another because a mutual defense treaty includes a declaration of borders as a prerequisite—something Israel is obviously unwilling to do.

Comments

2 Replies

#1 − Philip Giraldi on the MSM

marco

On the topic of American brainwashing, there’s the article Shaping the Story on Iran:

“The unanimity of view is particularly evident on the editorial pages where the neocons and the groupthink that they have fostered have become deeply embedded. Everyone in the MSM agrees that Iran either already has nukes or is about to go nuclear and that the country shelters terrorists on every block, all colluding to attack a completely innocent and guileless United States. Saturated with the propaganda, the American public more or less accepts that narrative.”

If you know that Iran has nuclear weapons, ask yourself how you know this. Do you know because you learned it from the same people that told you that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

Do you think it’s perhaps time that you start thinking for yourself before even more people are killed in order to assuage your irrational fears.

#2 − Juan Cole also wonders what comes next

marco (updated by marco)

The article, Israel’s Gift to Iran’s Hardliners by Juan Cole (TomDispatch), points out that Iran is not as stupid as Washington seems to think it is, and the world is not as convinced of Iran’s intrinsic evil as the U.S. and Israel think it is.

“The hypocrisy in all this was visibly Washington’s and Israel’s. After all, both were demanding that a country without nuclear weapons ‘disarm’ and the only country in the region to actually possess them be excused from the disarmament process entirely. This was, of course, their gift to Tehran. Like others involved in the process, Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency immediately noted this and riposted, ‘The U.S… is obliged to go along with the world’s request, which is that Israel must join the NPT and open its installations to IAEA inspectors.’”

Israeli and U.S. policy has been working against itself for a while now, with their actions fitting poorly together with their stated goals. For example,

“[Netanyahu’s] election as prime minister in February 2009 turns out to have been the best gift the Israeli electorate could have given Iran. The Likud-led government continues its colonization of the West Bank and its blockade of the civilian population of Gaza, making the Iranian hawks who harp on injustices done to Palestinians look prescient. It refuses to join the NPT or allow U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities, making Iran, by comparison, look like a model IAEA member state.”

Either Israel and the U.S. don’t believe that anyone will notice that they are failing utterly, they are otherwise benefiting it, they just don’t care or they are utter idiots. Or perhaps some wondrous combination of all of these.