The U.S. claims that Iran is the dangerous one. Really?
Today's guest post holds up a mirror to the U.S. and Israel:
"How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen."
Herb Rothschild was a professor of English at LSU. He has been a lifetime activist on behalf of peace, justice, and the environment. He is the author of The Bad Old Days, a memoir of his years as a civil rights activist in Louisiana. He was the founder of ashland.news, a now-thriving online newspaper for Ashland, Oregon.
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| Herb Rothschild |
Shortly after Trump let Netanyahu lead him by the nose again and attack Iran for the second time, he sent me an email saying that Iran wants to bring DEATH (he loves caps) to America. I’m not sure of that. I am sure that for many years America has wanted to bring death to Iran.
Our hostility dates from January 1979, when popular resistance forced the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to flee. Before that, Iran was a close ally. Indeed, during the Nixon-Kissinger years, it was the anchor of our Middle East policy. We loaded it with weapons, and the U.S. embassy in Tehran was our largest in the world, staffed by more than 1000 Americans, mostly CIA agents and military advisors.
A main reason we liked the Pahlavis—the father, then the son—was that they allowed Western oil companies to exploit their nation’s vast resources at sweetheart prices. Most Iranians didn’t share our pleasure. When a politician named Mohammad Mosaddegh called for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, there was an outpouring of popular support, and on April 28, 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to appoint Mossadegh prime minister.
Consequently, the British Secret Service and the CIA worked successfully to topple Mosaddegh and reinstall the shah, who subsequently ruled over a restless population through terror. SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, had been created in 1957 with assistance from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. SAVAK became widely feared for surveillance, imprisonment, and torture. It even operated in the U.S. with CIA consent, spying on Iranian expats and students.
After the shah was overthrown, Carter foolishly allowed Kissinger to persuade him to allow the dying shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. Enraged, young Iranians occupied the U.S. embassy, which had continued as an outpost of U.S. spying. They held U.S. personnel hostage until January 1981. In response, the U.S. imposed the first of what were to become a series of economic sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, believing that its revolution had weakened Iran, invaded his neighbor on September 22, 1980. Thus began an eight-year war in which Iran suffered about 300,000 deaths and 500,000 wounded. During the war, the U.S. provided Iraqi forces with satellite imagery and battlefield intelligence to target Iranian troop concentrations. Iraq also received U.S. agricultural credits and trade, which helped finance its war effort.
It’s impossible to forgive someone whom you’ve injured. So, the U.S. has treated Iran as an enemy ever since the fall of the shah.
Stoking our animosity has been Iran’s support for armed groups trying to save the Palestinians from Israel’s ethnic cleansing. How can a nation (ours) that has furnished Israel the money and weapons with which Israel has been displacing and killing Palestinians since 1948—not even halting the flow of arms as Israel commits genocide in Gaza—tolerate another nation’s taking the opposite side? Isn’t the designation of terrorist states our sole prerogative?
And what a game the U.S. and Israel have played over Iran’s nuclear weapons program! In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the U.S. and five other major powers. Accordingly, it gave up its efforts to develop nuclear weapons and placed its nuclear facilities under continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel opposed the agreement, and the Israel lobby nearly succeeded in getting Congress to abrogate Obama’s decision to make the U.S. a party to it.
As soon as Trump took office in 2017, he pulled the U.S. out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Biden didn’t undo that damage. So, Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program, which then became a prime justification for the U.S. and Israel (both nuclear powers) to attack it.
How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen. That’s just in the Middle East. If I were to list the other countries the U.S. has attacked and invaded in my lifetime, I would exceed the word limit Peter gave me.
Surely it’s time for us to rethink the designations of “good guys” and “bad guys” in the geopolitical narratives that we have been fed for so long. Or do we fear the moral obligation to resist that such honesty will impose on us?
[Note: In the interests of wholesome discussion of serious issues, I will happily consider potential guest post submissions which choose to argue that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region.]
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7 comments:
When you start paying $5 or more at the pump, you know who to blame. The Peace President is now talking about invading Cuba. Didn't we have an agreement with Moscow back in 1962 during the Cuba Missile Crisis that we wouldn't invade Cuba in return for getting their nuclear missiles out of there? If we invade Cuba, is that agreement now void? Invade Greenland? It's a giant iceberg. We already have bases there, so what's the point?
I think we have a President that's out of control and it's only going to get worse. He still have 3 more years to disrupt the world. Kinda a scary thought. Perhaps the Midterms go the Democrat way and rein him in. The only thing he really listens to is the polls. If they take a dive, he might back off. One can only hope.
The Iranian government is estimated to have killed over thirty thousand protesters. It’s an evil regime. Israel is estimated to have killed over 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza and is still restricting the flow of food and humanitarian aid to the people whose homes, hospitals, schools and other services they’ve destroyed. Which is worse?
"How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None".
Er, Israel, for one, most infamously in October 2023, at the cost of 1,200 tortured, raped and executed. That's assuming of course we don't ignore Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, among others--militant groups funded, armed and trained by Iran, to menace and destabilize various Middle Eastern neighbors. And are we really asserting with a straight face that Iran "gave up its efforts to develop nuclear weapons" in 2015, and submitted to dispositive oversight?
Bad America, Bad Israel diehards on the political left** not surprisingly consign America and Israel to the Bad Guys. Floating Iran as among the Good Guys, however, is one whopper of a stretch.
(**the political left in America and Europe, that is. Over 90% of Israelis, including Netanyahu's staunchest detractors, support his action against the long-established multivalent danger that is Iran).
Entered on behalf of John C.
"Peter C, if he manages to justify Martial Law, or succeed in “rigging the elections” by having the GOP run them, then he won’t care about polls because the people’s will won’t matter. He’ll be as popular as the his idol the Dear Leader."
The US, Isreal,Saudi Arabia,Russia, and certainly Iran are all bad guys. Canada is a good guy though, maybe we should cooperate with Canada as a trade partner.
Mr. Rothschild, would the Israelis continue to kill Palestinians in Gaza if Hamas surrendered? If not, why do you say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza? This is not to excuse the way that Israel has operated in Gaza since October, 2023. However, genocide is different from killing civilians in a war. Mr. Rothschild or Mr. Sage, please define genocide in relation to Israel's military actions in Gaza.
For years Israel has used Hamas to justify its land theft, ethnic cleansing and murder. All those things continue in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas has no presence. That strikes me as conclusive evidence that Israel's intention, which can be traced to the beginnings of modern Zionism, has always been to occupy all of the land it considers "eretz Israel." There have been many attempts to halt the land theft and ethnic cleansing by nonviolent resistance, but they have failed. So has Hamas's violent resistance. Regarding genocide, that is not my judgment but the judgment of the international community. Actually, I think Israel would be content if all Palestinians--Muslims and Christians--would just go away. Unlike Hitler, I don't think Israel is interesting in exterminating them. In the West Bank, the better designation of Israeli conduct is "settler colonialism." But like White settlers in the U.S., pushing Native Americans off their lands often went hand in hand with killing them. In Gaza, the settlements didn't work--it was too hard for the Israel Defense Forces to protect them. So, Ariel Sharon withdrew them. Gaza became an outdoor concentration camp, from which, on October 7, some of the prisoners temporarily broke out. That gave Netanyahu the justification for exterminating Gazans. The U.S. balked at Israel's effort to starve them all. It's not yet clear what the end will be.
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