Middle East ......

Iran’s purported nuclear weapons program is the evidence-free equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s mythical WMDs and alliance with Al-Qaeda.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to the deaths of over 4,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, resulted in widespread destruction, regional instability and gave birth to a range of fanatical extremist groups, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The airy promises — that our invasion would implant democracy in Baghdad, which would emanate outwards across the Middle East, that we would be greeted as liberators and that the oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction — were a fantasy dreamed up by the George W. Bush administration and Washington think tanks. These shills for endless war do not grasp the mechanism or the consequences of war. They are culturally, historically, and linguistically illiterate about the countries they attack. Iraq. Afghanistan, Libya. Syria. Iran. I doubt they can tell the difference.

These cheerleaders of war, once they are proven wrong, are adept as issuing mea culpas. They assure us of their good intentions. They did not mean to peddle disinformation. They only wanted to keep the world safe from “evildoers” and protect our national security. No one, even those within the Bush and now Trump administrations, are intentionally dishonest. It is not their fault if they act on flawed intelligence. The problem is one of judgment, not virtue. They are good people.

But this, perhaps, is the biggest lie. The intelligence assessments used to justify the war against Iraq were cooked up by a cabal of lunatic neoconservatives and rabid Zionists because they did not like the assessments of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies. Now another cabal, dominated by Israel-firsters, is concocting bogus intelligence assessments to justify a war with Iran. These wars are not prosecuted in good faith. They are not based on a careful and rational assessment of verifiable intelligence. They are utopian visions severed from reality where our own intelligence agencies are ignored along with international bodies such as the United Nations, WMD inspectors or the IAEA.

The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyrants propped up and funded by Western powers. The brutal crushing of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power. The new Islamic government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini championed Islam and argued for standing up to “arrogant” world powers and their regional allies, who would oppress others – including Palestinians – to serve their own interests.

“The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted the country,” Stephen Kinzer, the author of “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” told me. “For a long time the perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship.”

“Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Kinzer said. “Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.”

You can see an interview I did with Kinzer about Iran here.

How would we react if Iran orchestrated a coup in the U.S. to replace an elected government with a brutal dictator, who for decades persecuted, assassinated and imprisoned democracy activists? How would we react if Iran armed and funded a neighboring state, as we did during the eight year war with Iraq, to wage war against us? How would we react if Iran shot down one of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes (CG49) — caustically nicknamed the “Robocruiser” by the crews of other American vessels — when in July 1988 it fired missiles at a commerical aircraft filled with Iranian civilians, killing all 290 passengers, including 66 children? How would we react if Iranian intelligence services sponsored terrorism within the U.S., as our and Israel’s intelligence services do in Iran? How would we react if these state-sponsored terrorist attacks included suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and “targeted assassinations,” of government officials, scientists and other Iranian leaders? How would we react if, like Israel, a country attacked us based on a hypothesis, an attack that is illegal under the U.N. charter, which forbids preemptive war?

The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos have risen once again from the crypt. They migrate like zombies from administration to administration. They are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Research Initiative, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations, the Israel lobby and the war industry. They are puppets jerked up and down by their masters, given megaphones by a bankrupt media, urging us forward from one quagmire to the next.

The old faces and the old lies are back, exhorting us into another nightmare.

In her March testimony to lawmakers, Gabbard said the intelligence community "continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003."

She also said the U.S. was closely monitoring Iran's nuclear program, noting that the country's "enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons."

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/americas-spies-say-iran-wasnt-building-a-nuclear-weapon-trump-dismisses-that-assessment

gimmesometruth27 said:

so were the targets obliterated or not?

trump says they were. 

iran says the uranium was moved ahead of time.

trump's cabinet does not know.

trump's generals do not know the extent of the damage.

who is in charge here?

pjl44 said:

Best practices to avoid looking like a raving lunatic on an internet forum:

- Offer your own hook or brief synopsis of the piece
- Clip and paste a screenshot of a key paragraph (optional)
- Link to the full piece

gimmesometruth27 said:

iraninan missile strikes killed 3 israelis tonight.

does this mean there is no ceasefire like dumbfuck said?

color me shocked.

gimmesometruth27 said:

iraninan missile strikes killed 3 israelis tonight.

does this mean there is no ceasefire like dumbfuck said?

color me shocked.

brianlux said:

^^^ Great article. Hedges nails it.

And in his own inimitable style, here's our good buddy Jello Biafra chiming in on the insanity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYrNnkROqqM