Super Savage Sunday: Obama Tightens the Screws on Iran
Arthur Silber follows up the post we linked to yesterday with
some more specifics on how an effective campaign against the war with
Iran might look: "
The First Ad: Who Are the Nazis Now?"
Ads like these would be a devastating Zen slap in the head to the
stunted American consciousness.
Get on over there and read it now.
Meanwhile,
the Peace Laureate is tightening the screws on Iran even further.
Barack Obama took a few minutes away from the big game on Super Bowl
Sunday
and imposed still more sanctions on Tehran
-- to punish them for legally pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy
program under close international supervision. (The pure, unmitigated
evil of these Persians, eh?)
Again, it must be stressed that not a single government in the world
-- including Israel -- believes that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
Not one. No one is making that claim. In fact, leading figures in both
the United States and Israel have made it very plain in recent weeks
that they do not believe Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
There is no
Iranian nuclear weapons program. It does not exist. And yet these same
leaders, at the same time, tell us that we must put more and more
pressure on Iran -- we must assassinate its scientists, we must carry
out covert ops inside its territory, we must surround it with bristling
military bases, we must belly up to its shores with vast fleets, we must
fill its skies with spy drones, and we must drive its ordinary citizens
into ruin and suffering with an ever-increasing array of sanctions --
in order to .... what, exactly?
Again, let's make it clear, in
great block letters ten feet high and five feet wide:
the elites pushing
us rapidly toward war
do not believe Iran is building a nuclear bomb.
What's more, they would not feel threatened if Iran did have a bomb.
There is only one thing they want: regime change in Tehran. And there is
only reason they want it: domination of strategic oil lands of the
Middle East. They certainly aren't concerned about the actual nature of
the Tehran regime -- which is far less repressive than the West's
beloved extremists in Saudi Arabia -- nor are they concerned in the
slightest about the Iranian people. The sanctions themselves prove that.
[Last month] we could read in the New
York Times (January 15) that "three leading Israeli security experts —
the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and
a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared
that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel."
Then,
a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an
interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:
Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?
Barak:
People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control
[inspection] regime right now ... in an attempt to obtain nuclear
weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently
that is not the case.
Lastly, we have the US Director of
National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: "We do
not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear
weapons. ... There are "certain things [the Iranians] have not done"
that would be necessary to build a warhead.
But as Blum notes, these statements are "never put into headlines by
the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all."
Instead, the fierce watchdogs of the American media are more than happy
to shape their stories in the service of the greater cause of
warmongering -- even though, again, our elites know full well that the
"Iranian bomb" is an empty threat:
On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS
News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by
American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: "But we know
that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what
concerns us." Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: "Are they
trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No ..." 5
One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:
Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?
Van
Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear
China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I've researched how the U.S. opposed
nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to
proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this
other country was very dangerous and didn't deserve to have nuclear
weapons. Americans believe they're the only people who deserve to have
nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like
Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who
have used them. ... We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian
nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however,
because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons
... thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S.
and Germany."
And so the beat goes on. Ordinary Iranians are going hungry, getting poorer,
having their futures destroyed
for the sole purpose of augmenting the wealth and power and privilege
of our American elites and their colonial outriders. And if this
domination is not handed to them on a platter by the current Iranian
regime, our elites are quite happy to kill countless thousands of
innocent people to get it.
That's the reality. That's the world you're living in. Do you like it? No? Then change it.
