U.S.
Ambassador Nikki Haley’s grandiose performance in front of the UN
on December 15 should send shivers down the spines of those who
remember Colin Powell’s equally disturbing performance in the
months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is just the
beginning of the a new media campaign against Iran with regime change
as the end goal.
by
Darius Shahtahmasebi
Part
1
The
United States has had Iran in its crosshairs for decades and current
media coverage indicates that US-Iranian relations are only getting
worse. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected
leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced him with a brutal U.S.- and
U.K.-backed dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As is typically the
case with covert CIA operations, the U.S. had other concerns when it
made the decision to lead a coup against Iran’s democratically
elected government and opted for a dictatorship instead. As explained
by The Guardian:
Britain,
and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded
Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests
after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company, latterly known as BP. But the U.K. needed U.S. support. The
Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.
The
Shah’s subsequent reign and stranglehold over Iran sowed the seeds
of anti-Western discontent. The Iranian people overthrew the Shah in
the historic 1979 revolution, and have almost completely rejected
Western influence ever since. Shortly afterward, the U.S. backed
Saddam Hussein in Iraq to take out Iran in a nonsensically brutal
conflict that lasted close to a decade, nearly killing off an entire
generation. Further, the U.S. knew Saddam Hussein was using chemical
weapons against the Iranian people and enabled him to do so — all
the while secretly selling arms to the Iranians in order to maximize
the death toll.
As
political analyst Noam Chomsky famously stated:
Not
a day has passed in which the U.S. has not been torturing Iranians.
That’s 60 years, right now.
But what
was Iran’s grave crime, for which the U.S. saw fit to punish Iran
for the last half a century at least? According to Chomsky:
Why the
assault against Iran? We’re back to the Mafia principle. In 1979,
Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant
that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an
independent path, not following U.S. orders…So, Iran has to be
punished for that.
Iran’s
greatest crime was wanting to reject American and British companies
from intruding on its own soil and resources, and take a nationalist
course not unlike many of the countries under the thumb of the
American empire that wanted to head in an independent direction.
This, one would have to admit, would be the essence of democracy —
a country deciding the way forward for its people without extrinsic
interference. We would do well to bear this in mind the next time the
U.S. alleges it wants to export democracy to the Middle East, having
actively and pointedly killed it in 1953.
Furthermore,
given that the U.S. supports a number of despotic regimes —
including its support for Saddam Hussein prior to Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait (which was given a controversial green light by the U.S. to
begin with) — the U.S. is left to its own creative devices to
manufacture allegations against Iran to justify its transformation
into a pariah state on the world stage. Sanctions, saber-rattling,
and crying wolf over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program have
been the go-to mantra for years.
As
stated by Professor Michel Chossudovsky, the propaganda against Iran
and its alleged nuclear program can be easily unpacked when one
considers the reality of the situation:
What
is unfolding (in Iran) is the outright legitimization of war in the
name of an illusive notion of global security. America’s
mini-nukes, with an explosive capacity of up to six times a Hiroshima
bomb, are upheld as a ‘humanitarian’ bomb, whereas Iran’s
nonexistent nuclear weapons are branded as an indisputable threat to
global security,
Chomsky
explains this paradigm from the Iranians’ point of view, stating:
Israel,
India and Pakistan all developed nuclear weapons with U.S.
assistance. India and Israel continue to maintain — have a
substantial U.S. support for their nuclear weapons programs and other
programs, such as the occupation of part of Syria in violation of
Security Council orders.
And
Iran is constantly threatened. The United States and Israel, two
major nuclear powers—I mean, one a superpower, the other a regional
superpower—are constantly threatening Iran with attack, threatening
Iran with attack every day. Again, that’s a violation of the U.N.
Charter, which bans the threat or use of force, but the U.S. is
self-immunized from international law, and its clients inherit that
right.
So
Iran is under constant threat. It’s surrounded by hostile nuclear
states. It — and maybe [it] is developing a deterrent capacity. We
don’t know. [The] New York Times knows, but intelligence doesn’t.
That’s the pretext.
As
Chomsky notes, Iran’s defense spending is relatively low compared
to the rest of the region (barely $15 billion USD). According to the
U.S. Defense Department’s annual review of Iran:
Iran’s
military doctrine is defensive. It is designed to deter an attack,
survive an initial strike, retaliate against an aggressor, and force
a diplomatic solution to hostilities while avoiding any concessions
that challenge its core interests.
This
type of assessment hardly resonates with the allegations against
Iran. If Iran is capable of fanning the fuels of a sectarian conflict
from Syria to Yemen, developing a rampant nuclear weapons program,
and constantly threatening Iran’s rivals in the region, it has been
able to do so on a very limited budget and with very limited
resources. Not to mention that Iran would also have had to
outmaneuver the U.S.-enforced crippling sanctions that have lasted
decades against Iran, all the while simultaneously taking over the
entire region.
In other
words, Iran’s capabilities and its military spending just don’t
harmonize with America’s numerous allegations against the Islamic
Republic.
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