HOOPLA

Spare us the pain of yet another repetition of the “Chicken Little, the sky is falling” syndrome, as journalist Seymour Hersh so accurately stated about his own writings on Iran during Sunday’s talk show “Late Edition” with Candy Crawley sitting in for Wolf Blitzer. The substance of the latest ‘revelations’ “Preparing the Battlefield”, in the June 29, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, is not more than a re-hash of very old news packaged under an alarmist-intended title. The so-called ‘facts’ do not amount to more than their intended purpose: to further dramatize the threat of military attack against the Iranian people and nation, in the form of the ceaseless psychological warfare, known as psyops, emanating from the western mass media.

It seems one of the motives in writing this latest ‘expose’ of the Bush Administration’s well-financed covert operations against Iran was best illuminated in Hersh’s discussion and retelling of the Pentagon’s version of the Iranian patrol boat incident back in January 2008. “Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran, but this mood could change quickly”, writes the investigative journalist, citing the Iranian patrol boat incident as a clear example of the “potential for escalation”. Although Hersh referred to a Gallup poll taken last November, when seventy-three per cent (73%) of the Americans surveyed favored economic means and diplomacy to address the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, compared to only eighteen per cent (18%) who favored direct military action, he went on to repeat George Bush’s characterization of the incident as “provocative” and “dangerous” on the day Bush was heading for an eight-day trip to the Middle East. “There was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and outrage at Iran”, writes Hersh.

What was left out of this story was that the purpose of the Bush trip was to gather up support for the Administration’s sagging efforts to bring some of the Arab governments to comply with U.S. foreign policy objectives of isolating Iran so as to increase U.S. hegemonic goals in the region. Furthermore, in repeating only a part of the old news, Mr. Hersh neglected to mention that the Iranian government produced actual audio-video footage of the so-called ‘provocative’ encounter, blowing so many holes in the official version that a week later the Pentagon had to sing a different tune. As we recall, Bush’s efforts, as well as the ridiculous Pentagon version of Navy warships being threatened by five small Iranian speed-boats fell flat on its face, and to this day Iran continues to enjoy a certain stature among its neighbors.

So, exactly what is the NEW news? We have already heard about the ‘secret’ moves of the Bush Administration against Iran, in the form of arming terrorist groups, such as the Jundallah, with links to Al Qaeda and ties to the drug culture via the C.I.A. and Special Operations funding. It is well-known within the Iranian community of the Pentagon’s use and funding of another dissident group camped out in Iraq under U.S. command, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known as the M.E.K., while still currently on the State Department’s terrorist list. These two groups, along with a tiny third armed group of thugs known as the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, PJAK, all receive notoriety and power because of their financial and logistical ties to the U.S. counter-intelligence operations in the Middle East and Asia. Perhaps the real news is the actual figure of Congress authorizing up to $400 million through the secret, but complicit actions of key members of the Democratic leadership in Congress, who were supposed to be making efforts to stymie the Administration’s plans for continuing the occupation of Iraq.

So what are other developments in this article? It is public knowledge printed in all of the mass media outlets that Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri-Maliki’s recent trip to Tehran in June resulted in an announcement (for what it’s worth) that the Iraqi government would ban any contact with foreigners and the M.E.K., and further stated that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries in the region (Iran), much to the disconcertment of Washington.

Hersh’s article spent considerable effort restating the old news about Admiral Fallon having been pushed out as head of the U.S. Central Command over ‘disagreements’ on Iran. What was more revealing was confirmation of our understanding that Fallon’s resignation had more to do with “putting out the fires in Iraq” as Fallon himself has stated, meaning controlling the resistance forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting against the continued occupation of the United States and NATO soldiers than it did about attacking Iran.

It seems that the bulk of the military establishment, Fallon and the Joint Chief of Staffs included, along with key policy-makers in the high echelons of the U.S. government had already concluded that expansion of the war from Afghanistan and Iraq into Iran was not possible at this time. In times of the “crisis of ruling for the empire”, who doesn’t know that inter-agencies disagreements, miscalculations of intelligence assessments, and even inner party political fights usually result in some heads rolling? This has been the outcome faced by the Bush Administration, who has been stripped of almost all of the “Old Guard” after nearly eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Given the rising tension between Iran and the U.S. these days, which could be read in the price of a barrel of oil, of course, it is politically safer not to downgrade the seriousness of the U.S. threat, but to yield and resound the Washington-Tel Aviv war drum beats serves the conservative causes of the war-mongers in the psyops battleground. It may be worth noting that the day after Hersh’s CNN interview, CNBC, the stock market channel, was giving airtime to John Bolton, a very hawkish neo-conservative, spreading his threat that Israel will bomb Iran’s strategic facilities, at the same time Seymour Hersh was being interviewed on Democracy Now. Why are Bolton and Hersh singing the same song?

Perhaps the real complications come with the realization among both Republicans and Democrats, in and out of the White House, that the United States government has to come up with a strong and convincing excuse, a justification, to the American people as to why they must be willing to expend even more than the trillion dollars of the U.S. treasury that has already been spent in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps for the next 5 to 10 years. That’s a hard sell.

Eleanor Ommani is a co-founder of the American-Iranian Friendship Committee (AIFC), www.progressiveportals.com/aifc and works with Wespac, NoWar Westchester, and Progressive News Network to promote peace with social justice in Iran and around the world. She can be emailed at Klosrtogod@optonline.net