On Feb. 23, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held a press conference on Iran’s nuclear program. He once again denied allegations by the U.S. and Israel that his country was developing nuclear weapons and declared “holding these arms is a sin as well as useless, harmful and dangerous.”
This bold statement received little to no press coverage in Western media, and it’s understandable given the caricature that the U.S. and Israeli governments have tried to paint of Iran’s nuclear program.
On Monday, the Alligator published a guest column by Dan DiMatteo concerning Israel’s steadfast determination for military action against Iran.
The author took up the mainstream media’s stance in calling for unwavering U.S. support for any and all Israeli aggression in the Middle East.
The ongoing rhetoric from politicians and news media consists of detailed lies, which have created the misleading image of a helpless Israel on the verge of destruction at the hands of an irrational and nuclear-capable Iran. The reality, however, is a different picture altogether.
All 16 American intelligence agencies sent to inspect Iran’s nuclear intentions reported that the country has neither the intentions nor the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
While fear-inducing speculation as to whether Iran will attack Israel in the near future sells newspapers and keeps oil prices high, the only acts of aggression carried out in recent history have been by the U.S., Israel and their allies against Iran.
In the past year, Israel and the U.S. have done their best to intensify their assault on Iran. In January, several Iranian scientists were assassinated in the streets of Tehran by a dissident group trained, armed and financed by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Twice this year, American military vessels have sailed into Iranian waters, barely a few miles from the country’s coastline, carrying dangerous weapons and massive warplanes. U.S. stealth drones sent to illegally spy on Iranian nuclear facilities were captured 140 miles into Iranian airspace.
Of course, the backdrop of all these recent acts of aggression is the debilitating economic sanctions that have left Iranian families devastated and its financial sector crippled.
U.S. intelligence agencies consistently report that Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons, and yet at the behest of Israel and Western corporations eager to access Iranian oil, the U.S. continues to paternalistically punish the Iranian people for something they simply aren’t doing.
The question Americans need to ask themselves amid all this misinformation is who’s really threatening whom.
In 1953, the CIA toppled the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, in Operation Ajax, and installed the Shah, a brutal monarch whose crimes were overlooked because of his willingness to inexpensively sell Iranian oil to the West.
After the Iranian revolution of 1979, the U.S. imposed the first round of sanctions on Iran in an act of economic aggression. And starting in 1980, the U.S. provided weapons and resources to the Iraqi government for a bloody eight-year war with Iran aimed at toppling the Islamic Republic.
The entirety of DiMatteo’s article focuses on Iran’s alleged irrationality and the danger it poses to Israel and the U.S. The characterization of state leaders who resist Western imperialism as insane and irrational actors has been a tried-and-true tactic for the U.S. to build support for its own aggressive foreign policy. In actuality, many military and intelligence officials in the Israeli government are staunchly opposed to war with Iran and view its government as a “very rational regime,” according to former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan.
We’ve heard an eerily similar story before regarding so-called crazy dictators and their willingness to use nuclear weapons on Israel and other U.S. allies.
Remember that in 2003, we were told that Saddam Hussein actually possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he was ready to use them in a military strike. Those fabrications by the Bush administration led the U.S. into the second-longest war in American history and left more than a million Iraqis and more than 4,800 American soldiers dead. Let’s not let the Obama administration lead us into the same quagmire.
When you cut through the B.S. and look at the facts, the only unreasonable fundamentalists are the warhawks in Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime pushing for another irrational war in the Middle East.
Dave Schneider and Cassia Laham are organizers with Students for a Democratic Society.
