President John Kennedy in June, 1963 gave a speech on peace—a peace, said Kennedy, that would not be “a pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” “Our diplomats,” he added, “are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”
Unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility: would any American public official or diplomat employ such irresponsible tactics?
Enter George W. Bush, who, absent any specific threat to the United States, in his State of the Union speech in January, 2002 said of North Korea, Iraq and Iran, “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”
Never mind that the World War II cachet attaching to the word “axis” was phony; since then, Iran’s very name has been loaded. Newscasters refer to Iran as if it were a source of evil that need only be assumed, not proved, not even described in detail. Sunni provocateurs from Saudi Arabia helped foment insurgencies in Iraq, but were hardly ever mentioned; Shiite operatives with connections to the “evil” Iran got all the play.
People remember, vaguely, that Iran took Americans hostage once. They don’t remember that the reason Iranian students took the hostages was that in order to keep our hold on Iran’s oil, we had propped up a Shah with a secret police force that terrorized, tortured and murdered Iranians.
Now we’ve entered a zone that’s ominously reminiscent of the runup to war with Iraq. It includes rickety accusations, equivocal reporting by the New York Times and grim network news footage of the Strait of Hormuz (which Iran has threatened to close, as it has before when it’s felt its sovereignty affronted; nothing new here). And it perpetuates our collective amnesia about our support for the Shah’s appalling police state.
Commondreams.org has detailed how the New York Times this month has misrepresented the Iranian “threat.” In one article from Jan. 4, the Times reported: “The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran’s nuclear program has a military objective, is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign.”
But the IAEA didn’t say that. It said, “The Agency has continued to receive, collect and evaluate information relevant to possible”—repeat, possible—”military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” As Commondreams reports, the Times changed its text on the Web, but meanwhile the story was running wild in the electronic echo chamber without the alteration.
The very same day, another Times story—this one about the possibility that Iran would try to close the Strait of Hormuz—contained this statement: “Various Iranian officials in recent weeks have said they would blockade the strait, which is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, if the United States and Europe imposed a tight oil embargo on their country in an effort to thwart its development of nuclear weapons.”
What our intelligence officials have said is that Iran seems to be keeping open its options to build nuclear weapons, not that it is building them. Common Dreams quotes James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who told Congress last March, “We do not know … if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.” That’s still the state of the case.
And others who can hardly be called peaceniks are speaking out to warn against war with Iran. Adam Lowther, a member of the faculty at the US Air Force’s Air University, recently told CNN that such a war would likely escalate beyond the U.S.’s “limited objectives.” Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of military, intelligence and foreign service officers, recently wrote in a memo on Iran to President Obama, “We are seeing a replay of the ‘Iraq WMD threat.’… The Israel lobby has been beating the drums for us to attack Iran for years… Another long war is not in America’s or Israel’s interests, whatever Israel’s apologists claim.”
