Three quick reads; natural follow ups to my post yesterday on Trump’s ‘beautiful armada’ and WW3.
First there’s Caitlin Johnstone, punchy as ever, writing today:
Only Idiots Believe The War Propaganda About Iran
It is not okay to be a grown adult in the year 2026 and still believe US regime change interventionism in the middle east will lead to positive outcomes …
… I don’t care if you are making your pro-regime change arguments from a right wing anti-Islam perspective, a liberal humanitarian pro-democracy perspective, a left-wing “solidarity with our Persian comrades” perspective, or an “oppose all tyranny equally” anarchist perspective. Your arguments are shit, and your position is wrong …
The goal is not to bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people. The US and Israel do not permit democracy in the middle east unless they can control its outcomes, as they are working to do right now in Iraq. The US and Israel are not popular enough in the middle east for the people to be allowed to control their own government.
The goal is to either install a puppet regime in Tehran, or to balkanize Iran into multiple independent states easily controlled, or plunge it into unmanageable chaos as in Libya. None of these plans advance the interests of the Iranian people …
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For his part Jonathan Cook has written two recent pieces on how, in demonising Iran to prime their audiences for war, corporate media abandon principles of independent reporting deemed sacrosanct on matters not vital to empire interests. (Here and here and here I say why, while a recent post on How fiction advances empire agendas summarises my reasoning.)
It matters little whether ‘liberal’ wings explicitly endorse criminal aggression by ‘our boys’ or by the deranged super-power to which ‘we’ long ago surrendered meaningful sovereignty. Indeed, some of their columnists may even counsel against it. But as Jonathan pointed out a decade ago in a rebuke aimed at radical George Monbiot but applicable to liberal media at large:
Monbiot has repeatedly denied he wants a military attack on Syria. But if he weakly accepts whatever narratives are crafted by those who do – and refuses to subject them to meaningful scrutiny – he is decisively helping to promote such an attack.
Since George’s pulpit is the Guardian, let’s see what Jonathan – who left that church years ago over its Israel bias – had to say yesterday:
The Guardian joins the cheerleading for a war of aggression against Iran
Corporate media doesn’t represent humanity’s interests. It promotes the interests of billionaires and their hangers-on, who make huge profits from a war machine in constant need of excuses to kill.
International law is absolutely clear. If the US attacks Iran, it would be a war of aggression and the “supreme international crime”. 1
The job of even supposedly liberal media like the Guardian is to persuade you this is not what is at stake. To disbelieve your lying eyes.
Look at this astonishingly dishonest headline and subhead from today’s paper:
“Threat of US-Iran war escalates” intentionally obscures the truth: that it is the US doing the “escalating” – and that its escalating is entirely illegal.
“Trump warns time running out for deal” makes it sound as though Trump has some kind of authority to make this “warning”. Hey, Guardian, maybe he’s doing it on behalf of his Board of Peace.
The truth is he has no such authority. That resides with the United Nations. What Trump is doing is not a warning; it’s a threat – an utterly illegal threat of aggression.
In any case, Iran has been trying to drag the US back to the negotiating table ever since Trump unilaterally tore up their original deal eight years ago. Time is only “running out” because the US has decided it now needs a pretext to launch an illegal war of aggression. Why is the Guardian not making that clear in its headlines?
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The BBC has a political agenda that says it is fine to headline a made-up, inflated figure of the dead in Iran because our leaders have defined Iran as an Official Enemy. While the BBC has a converse political agenda that says it’s fine to employ endless caveats to minimise a death toll in Gaza that is already certain to be a huge undercount because Israel is an Official Ally.
In a second post, also yesterday, Jonathan targeted the BBC:
The BBC pushes the case for an illegal war on Iran with even bigger lies than Trump’s
The UK state broadcaster streams disinformation into our living rooms – deceptions that not only leave us clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to global conflagration
Here is another example of utterly irresponsible journalism from the BBC on tonight’s News at Ten. Diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley starts by credulously amplifying a fantastical death toll of “tens of thousands of dead” from recent protests in Iran – figures provided by regime opponents. Contrast that with the BBC’s two years of downplaying the numbers killed in Gaza by Israel.
The idea that in a few days Iranian security forces managed to kill as many Iranians as Israel has in Gaza by prolonged carpet-bombing to level the tiny enclave, while starving its population, beggars belief. The figures sound patently ridiculous because they are patently ridiculous.
Either the Iran death toll is massively inflated, or the Gaza death toll is a massive underestimate. Or far more likely, both are intentionally being used to mislead …
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Here are another three short related and relevant reads, all on one site:
https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/the-west-and-zugzwang-the-inevitable
1. The West and Zugzwang: the inevitable end of hegemonic domination
“Iran is a separate issue. This country is not the equivalent of a pawn on a chessboard, but rather a bishop or, perhaps, a rook. For this reason, chess players do not allow it to be taken lightly. Any perceived threat is carefully analysed and countermeasures are meticulously prepared.”
2. The Silent Theft: The operation that the system does not mention
“There is a noise that does not appear in financial charts and does not reverberate through the halls of Wall Street. It is an ancient, muffled noise that cannot be heard until it is too late: the sound of metal leaving the vaults.
That is where the silent theft begins.”
3. But what humanitarian rights in Venezuela and Iran? Regime change serves to save the petrodollar!
“The dominant narrative is that the West, led by its business-minded Sheriff, wants to restore order and Pax Americana in those countries for ethical and humanitarian reasons. Unfortunately, this argument, even if only minimally true, is merely an alibi and allows for a media debate that distracts from the dominant motive, namely the economic and geopolitical motive based on the “crisis of the US dollar and the immense imperial public debt”.”
Thanks. I’ll check them out over the weekend.