Hello all. When Most Americans think Iran
they think hostages. For 444 days
66 american
diplomats were held against their will.
This happened 35 years ago, but the Hostage Crisis
was an OJ or Monica level media event.
Before 9-11 it was the main thing most
of us knew about the Middle East,
and it still reverberates in the consciousness
of the Americans that do the most voting
So when our government tells
us that Iran is evil or crazy, we tend to
believe it. This is a mistake. Today, I’d
like to take a closer look at the
claims that Washington, DC makes about Iran,
and how the US government misrepresents what’s
really going on.
We are told that Iran supports Terrorism,
and that’s true! But they haven’t supported
an attack on a US asset in decades.The worst
thing they ever did to us was probably a bombing
that took place in Beirut in 1983. It killed
299 United States Marines.
The thought that the
Iranian higher-ups who may have approved this horror have escaped
justice bothers me deeply. The thing is, the Iranian public probably feels the same way about
Donald Rumsfeld and the entire Reagan administration.
In 1983, in his capacity as the President’s
special envoy to the Middle East, Rumsfeld
met with Saddam Hussein. At the time Hussein
was pursuing a savage war of aggression against
Iran, using chemical weapons, and killing
between 200,000 and 600,000 Iranian soldiers
and civilians. Saddam’s invasion
of Iran would not have been possible without
the 10s of billions of dollars worth of support
he received from the US and our allies. Hundreds
of Americans lost family members due to the
Iranian government’s alleged actions in
Beirut. Millions of Iranians lost family members
due to the US government’s documented actions.
If Iran is content to let the 1980s fade away
into the past, we should be too, and we should
also be grateful.
We are told that Iran is run by a disgusting theocracy, and that’s true! By Middle East
standards, Iran is actually pretty democratic,
with regular elections, and a government that’s
occasionally accountable to the people. The Problem is that they’ve also got this guy, the Supreme leader,
who can countermand anything, supposedly according
to religion, but in practice according to
whatever the hell he wants. We’re right
to critique this, but we do not have the moral
high ground. They had a better government
in 1953, and we brought about a coup to overthrow
it. The shah, the savage dictator we supported
for the next 26 years, was much, much worse
than the current regime. When a Revolution
finally overthrew him in 1979, we supported
Saddam’s attack on Iran. That brutal fight
for survival allowed the religious nut jobs
to crush all the secular elements of the revolution.
When peace was finally restored the moderate
elements slowly crawled their way back into
power. They were making real progress up until
2002, when, despite the help that they were
giving us in Afghanistan, George W. Bush declared
Iran to be part of an axis of evil that had
to be destroyed. This quasi-declaration of
war understandably put the “Death to America”
crowd right back on top. Not a great record.
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration
to say that United States aggression is the main
reason Iran isn’t a fully functional democracy
today. If we truly want a better Iranian system,
the best thing we can do is stop trying to
control it. Peace is the way forward.
We are told that Iran hates Israel and that’s
true! In fact, Iran is the only threatening
enemy that they have has left, which is why Israel
is trying so hard to hold on to them. After
67 years of fighting, the Arab World is either
too weak or too bribed, to do anything other
than whine at the United Nations. They’ll
occasionally get it together to fund a suicide
bombing, the favored tool of failed civilizations
and losers everywhere. Iran, on the other
hand is the main funder of Lebanese Hezbollah,
a military force that has managed to defeat
the Israeli Defense Forces in open combat.
They’ve done this despite
the fact that Iran has little real love for
the Palestinians. Iran would much rather be
using Hezbollah to fight against Sunni Jihadists
like ISIS. Iran has been trying to make peace
with us for decades. If we let that process
move forward, and let Iran focus on the enemy
they’d rather be fighting. Israel will be safer than it has ever been.
So we’ve established that peace with Iran
is the just thing to do. In addition it would
lead to a safer Israel and cheaper oil, our
two greatest interests in the region. Yet
supposedly respectable foreign policy leaders
can say stuff like this:
Bomb Iran? Heh, heh [sings] Bomb, bomb bomb Iran... anyway..
When veterans are together, veterans joke. And I was with veterans and we were joking...
And this:
There was a vote in the Senate today. Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has authored
another resolution, and it is essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to
congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against it, and I'm ashamed of you Hillary for voting
for it. You're not going to get another shot at this.
Senator Clinton I want to give you a chance to respond. [Clinton laughs uproariously]
Well I don't know where to start...
And This...
Why do we keep listening to these people?
Their fantasies are hurting Iran, they are
hurting the world more generally, and they
are hurting the United States.
We seem to need an enemy to function. It’s
not that the US government is evil, it’s
just that it is deeply confused. It’s the
kind of confusion that can only be built by
tens of thousands of really smart people working
in an endeavor that they don’t really understand.
It comes down to the fact that everything
we hear about foreign policy in the United
States, is influenced by something called
the Military Industrial complex. Over the
next few weeks we’ll be walking through
what it is, what it does, and what we can
do about it. I hope you’ll tune in.
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