Rogue empire
Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”.
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state.
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will.
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted a joint departmental report to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks.
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in an exclusive investigation for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded: “We think the price is worth it”.
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left hundreds of thousands dead in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region.
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.
