TOMORROW PROTEST THE ECONOMIC WAR AGAINST
IRAN AND THE THREATENED VIOLENT WAR
SATURDAY, JULY 20 (AND 27TH), COURT HOUSE, COLLEGE
AND DICKSON, 11 A.M. Contact Abel
Tomlinson.
OMNI
IRAN NEWSLETTERS,
JULY 19, 2019
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, and ECOLOGY
(#11 Oct. 8, 2011; #12 Jan. 31, 2012; #13 Feb.
22, 2012; #14 Feb. 26, 2012; #15 March 17, 2012; #16 April 12, 2012; #17 May
21, 2012; #18, July 9, 2012; #19 August 13, 2012; #20 Sept. 10, 2012; #21, Dec.
14, 2012; #22 March 5, 2013; #23 Nov. 12, 2013; #24 March 5, 2014; #25 January
17, 2015; #26, July 28, 2015; #27, June 3, 2018; #28, June 21, 2019; #29, July 11,
2019; #30, July 19, 2019.)
CONTENTS: IRAN NEWSLETTER #30, July 19, 2019
I. Northwest
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Reporting Iran: Analyzed April-July 2019 by Dick
II. National Newspapers Examined by FAIR: Shupak
and Cho
III. General Criticism of US Aggressions against
Iran
LTE from ARKie Reg Edwards
Veterans Against War
Petition to Congress
Essay Against Sanctions by
Dan Cohen
History of Iran, the 1950s
by Heather Gray
IV. Dick’s Newsletters on Iran 2011-Present
TEXTS
I. NADG Reports
on Iran April 7--
APRIL
NYT’S BRET STEPHENS--
WARMONGER
Bret Stephens. NYT. “The fiasco
that wasn’t”. 4-7-19. A FAIR article analyzes a Bret Stephens argument to “sink
Iran’s navy”: New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/14/19) contended, “If Iran won’t change its
behavior, we should sink its navy.” The word “behavior” telegraphs how Stephens
presents Iran is a nation of children that needs to be disciplined by its
masters in the civilized world. He writes that “allowing Iran to go unpunished isn’t an
option. What is appropriate is a new set of rules — with swift consequences if
Iran chooses to break them. The Trump administration ought to declare new rules
of engagement to allow the Navy to engage and destroy Iranian ships or fast
boats that harass or threaten any ship, military or commercial, operating in
international waters. If Tehran fails to comply, the US should threaten to sink
any Iranian naval ship that leaves port.
If
after that Iran still fails to comply, we would be right to sink its navy, in
port or at sea. The world cannot tolerate freelance Somali pirates. Much less
should it tolerate a pirate state seeking to hold the global economy hostage
through multiplying acts of economic terrorism.”
In Stephens’
estimation, the US has the right to issue “a new set of rules” and, in the
event that Iran doesn’t “comply” with the US’s imperial fiats about the waters
off Iran’s shores, employ gunboat diplomacy to enforce them. Notice how quickly
he slides from “the US” in the first of these paragraphs to “the world” in the
second, as though these are one and the same. Interestingly, his definition of
“economic terrorism” seems only to include actions that Iran is accused of
taking but hasn’t been proven to have done, and not the full-scale destruction of the Iranian economy that the US has
embarked on in plain sight.
D-G staff.
“Iranian bill labels US forces terrorists” 4-17-19. Well aren’t they? The headline should be? Iranian Bill
Recognizes US Terrorism. What would Trump, Bolton, Pompeo, Pence say if the Iranians had an
aircraft carrier attack group in the Gulf of Mexico? (Google search US carrier
attack force, and read about each of the ships.) Or if a U.S. cruiser in the Strait of Hormuz
shot down an Iranian civilian airliner and killed all 200-plus people on board,
as happened? See LTE from Reg Edwards at
end: thank you Reg..
Matthew Lee. AP. “US adds wiggle room to Iran Guard
pressure. 4-25-19. IG pressure?! Take a look at the graphic of Iran surrounded
by US military bases? And the US has
some 800 bases.
MAY
Nasser Karimi. AP. “Report: Iran to pull back from nuke
deal.” 5-3-19. Why shouldn’t they since the U.S.ripped it
up already? The other half of the nuke
deal was for the U.S. to lift its crippling sanctions, its economic warfare on
Iran. So Trump tears up the agreement,
increases sanctions, and denounces Iran for breaking the agreement.
From Medea Benjamin’s book
Inside Iran: “It’s a wonder that the Iranian economy functions as
well as it does, given the crippling restrictions it is been subjected to since
the time of the 1979 revolution.
Sanctions started with the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, when the Carter
administration banned Iranian oil imports, froze $12 billion in Iranian
government assets in the U.S., and imposed an embargo on travel to Iran….(In
1983) the Reagan administration, after the 1983 bombing of a US Marine compound
in Lebanon, blocked World Bank loans to Iran and later banned all US imports
from Iran. Starting in 1995, the
Clinton administration used sanctions (including a total trade and investment
embargo and pressured foreign companies from investing in Iran) to punish Iran
for links to groups it defined as terrorists—Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad.”
Lorne Cook. AP. “EU to Iran: Abide by nuclear pact. 5-10-19.
Iran did abide by the pact. The
US did not. Does
the EU tell the US to “abide by the nuclear pact”? And what pact is there to abide by?
Jon Gambrell. AP. “Saudis: Oil tankers sabotaged near
UAE. 5-13-19.
Associated Press. “Iranian authorities shut magazine over
US talks stance.” 5-13-19. Iran presented as authoritarians attacking
free press. See Heather Gray’s history
below.
Jon Gambrell. AP. “Iran suspected in ship sabotages.”
5-14-19. Suspected by whom? On what evidence? (I’m writing this 7-18-19.) What should that headline have said?
D-G Staff. “Talking down war talk” 5-15-19
D-G Staff. “Lawmakers say fill us in on Iran” 5-17-19
D-G Staff. “Airlines told of flight risk in Iran region”
5-19-19. The flight risk warning is focused
on a risk from Iranian attack. Do we
need to fear them, or the US? Forgotten
or suppressed is the U.S. shooting down an Iranian civilian aircraft, Iran Air
flight 655, in 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew. This is paralleled by US warnings of nuclear
weapons possessed by other nations, when only the US has used them and
threatened to use them repeatedly.
D-G Staff. “Will fight if Iranians start war, Saudis say”
5-20-19. The Iranians are not starting a
war and have not threatened to start a war.
But the US is engaged in an economic war against Iran and is threatening
a military war. We cannot gild the
Saudis’ misleading statement with the label of sophistry (enabled by the
newspaper’s headline) because it is not clever, plausible, or subtle. The denied facts require a second
exposure: The US has engaged in economic
warfare on Iran for a long time. It is
the US that is starting war. See Cohen
below on sanctions.
Richard Chapman LTE. “Actions speak loudly” 5-21-19
D-G Staff. “Iran boosts uranium production” 5-21-19.
D-G Staff. “Trump officials say US actions to deter
attacks” 5-22-19. The US is responding
in “defense”. See the FAIR analysis following in Part II.
Amir Vahdat. AP. “Iranian
sets blame for deal failure: For First Time, Ayatollah Criticizes President, Top Envoy on Pact.” 5-23-19.
David Rising. AP. “German
to urge Iran to keep nuke deal” 5-24-19. What is not emphasized is that half of the
nuke deal is removing the US crippling economic
sanctions (economic warfare) on Iran that have been going on since 1979. Trump did not keep the nuke deal. The whole world knows it, except for a
minority of US populace bumfuzzled by their ideology and demagogue. See Dan Cohen below on sanctions
AP. “[UN] Watchdog group: Iran Complying with 2015 deal”.
5-25-19. MANY THANKS TO
THE UN, but I wish it had spoken earlier and repeatedly. Oh, perhaps it did, and was not
reported. Pres. Trump failed utterly to comply with the
agreement involving a half-dozen major powers by unilaterally withdrawing from
it, yet he is accusing Iran of not complying and uses this falsification to
increase even more the economic warfare of sanctions, which is the central
source of conflict. See Cho below.
D-G Staff. “Iran protests US troop buildup.” 5-26-19.
Michael Kranish. WaPo.
“Trump rebuffs claims he wants shakeup in Iran.” 5-28-19.
Hoyt Purvis. “Reverberations in Iran.” 5-29-19
John Gambrell. AP. “Bolton warns Iran of reprisals”
5-30-19. They forgot to mention that
Bolton is a verifiable war criminal.
Title should read “War Criminal Warns Iran of another Illegal War of
Aggression.” (Ref.: The UN Charter and
subsequent writings about threatening war.
THE U N CHARTER FORBIDS, EXCEPT AS AND WHEN
AUTHORIZED BY THE SECURITY COUNCIL,THE USE OF FORCE
AGAINST ANOTHER STATE, EXCEPT IN CASE OF DEFENSE AGAINST ARMED ASSAULT, AND THIS
OFFENSE VIOLATES A NORM PRESCRIBED BY OUR OWN CONSTITUTION.)
D-G Staff. “Saudi official calls for ‘force, firmness’
with Iran.” 5-31-19. As if American citizens should take Saudi
officials as rational, credible foreign policy advisors while they commit
genocidal war crimes in Yemen. What
should this headline say? Read the UN
Charter.
JUNE
Matthew Lee. AP. “In Europe, Pompeo keys on Iran” 6-1-19
Arsalan Shahla. Bloomberg. “Pompeo: US ready to talk to
Iran” 6-3-19
Mari Yamaguchi. AP. “Japan’s Abe going to Iran as
mediator in conflict with US” 6-7-19
Robert Burns. AP. “US makes presence known to Iran.”
6-9-19. The US has Iran surrounded by wars
and military bases. Its presence is
constantly known. You have seen the cartoon of Iran, surrounded by US military
bases, asked why it had placed itself so close to them?
Amir Vahdat. AP. “Japans Abe warns of ‘accidental
conflict’ amid US-Iran tensions” 6-13-19
D-G Staff. “Blasts
Hit Ships; U.S. Blames Iran. Crews of
Two Oil Vessels Rescued; Pompeo Sees Tehran’s Hand.” 6-14-19.
1A, 4A.
D-G Staff. “Iran did it, says Trump, ripping ‘nation of
terror.’” 6-15-19. Trump again accuses
Iran of attacking two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, citing a video from US
Central Command ”purporting to show Iranian vessels retrieving an unexploded
[limpet]mine from one of the damaged ships.”
But the co. that owns the tanker challenged the assertion saying it was
hit by a “flying object.” It’s a long
report (for the ADG) like many of them needing careful analysis.
D-G Staff. “Crew of attacked ship out of Iranian hands”
6-16-19.
D-G Staff. “Pompeo vows more proof Iran hit tankers.”
6-17-19.
D-G Staff. “Iran
to Top Uranium Limits; U.S. Ups Troops.”
6-18-19. 1A, 2A. Iran presented as a threat for moving from 4%
enriched uranium (for nuclear power) to 5%, when 90% is necessary for a bomb,
when it was the US president who broke the deal of Iran remaining below
4%. The United States Responds to the
threat. Follows pattern described in
FAIR article by Joshua Cho below of Iran being presented as an aggressive
threat and US responding, and not vice versa which is much more the case. [Alex Mironoff. LTE.
“Need to Rest After That.”
6-18-19. A part of the letter
defends Iran against Trump.]
D-G Staff. Cartoon
satirizing Gulf of Oman attack as similar to Gulf of Tonkin. 6-19-19. The cartoon related the Persian Gulf to the
Gulf of Tonkin, where mistaken
identification, poor judgement, and desire for war helped to trigger the
Vietnam War.
[On June 20, Iran shot down a US RQ-4 drone.]
D-G Staff. “Iran Reports It shot Down U.S. Drone in Its
Airspace.” 6-20-19. 1A, 5A. A report
mainly about the bombing of the tanker ships.
ADG also published a cartoon relating the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of
Tonkin, where mistaken identification, poor judgement, and desire for war
started the Vietnam War.
D-G Staff. “Trump Ok’d, Then Halted Iran [retaliatory]
Strikes: Reason for Canceled Plans Unknown.”
6-21-19, 1A,5A. Read the final 3
essential paragraphs. There we learn
that Iran’s territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles, as does Oman’s across
the strait. Iran’s foreign affairs
minister “gave what he said were precise coordinates for where the U.S. drone
was targeted” near Kouh-e-Mobarak, and he said sections of the drone were
retrieved “in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down.” Here is the ADG’s final paragraph: “The GPS
coordinates released by [minister Zarif] would put the drone 8 miles off Iran’s
coast, to inside the 12 nautical miles from shore that Iran claims as
territorial waters.” Apparently the
drone was shot down over Iranian territory, which explains why Trump canceled
the retaliatory strike.
D-G Staff. “Surprising News, More secrets exposed to
enemy. 6-21-19
DG Staff. “No Sign
of Iran Topping Uranium Stockpile Cap.” 6-28-19. 8A.
JULY
D-G Staff. “Iran surpasses
deal’s uranium limit. 7-2-19.
[Art Hobson. “Another U.S.
war? Perhaps it’s time to slow down and think.” 7-2-19.]
David Haltfinger. NYT. “Israeli spy chief says Iran hit
tankers in Persian Gulf.” 7-2-19.
Mike Masterson. “Every
Last Vessel.“ 7-2-19.
Amir Vahdat. AP. “Ex-Guard
Head: Take British ship.” 7-6-19
D-G
Staff. “Iranian Video Issues Threat on Uranium. 7-7-19. Threat? Rather, more fear-mongering and war threatening by US and fecklessness
by European leaders, as Ali Akbar Velayati explains: “’Americans directly and
Europeans indirectly violated the deal.’
European parties to the deal have yet to offer a way for Iran to avoid
the sweeping economic sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump since he
pulled the U.S. out of the accord a year ago, especially those targeting its
crucial oil sales.” Velayati continues
by explaining Iran’s intention to meet every US additional sanction by
enriching its uranium commensurately.
“’We reduce our commitments as much as they reduce’” theirs. Remember the accord (the “deal”) arranged by
the Obama administration: Iran agreed 1) to enrich uranium to no more than 3.67%, which is enough for peaceful
pursuits but is far below weapons-grade levels of 90%; and 2) to limit its stockpile of uranium to 661 pounds. Trump trashed the agreement and increased
sanctions, so Iran began ratcheting up both, while appealing to Europeans to
restore the accord. Now read the scary
headline again. In contrast to the
headline, the full report gives Iran’s point of view. What is missing here, as it is absent
throughout this crisis reporting, is explanation of what is behind and
underneath Trump’s ferocious, vicious prejudice against Iran. For partial answers to this complex
historical and psychological question see the next section, but involved are 1)
his desire to dismantle all of Pres. Obama’s achievements, which seems both
personal and ideological, and 2) his commitment to Israel the nation and
Netanyahu the person.
D-G Staff. “Iran Discards Another Piece of Nuke Pact: Willing to
Talk, official Says as Enrichment Levels Raised.”” 7-8-19. Another report packed with crucial details, including plenty of
space for Netanyahu to repeat his conflation of Iran and Nazi Germany and his
perception of a quick leap from 3.67% uranium enrichment to 90%.
Kate
Brumback. AP. “Iran scientist faces sanctions case in U.S.” 7-8-19
David
Rising. AP. “France Steps Up Diplomacy to Save Nuclear
Accord.” NADG (7-10-2019).
D-G
Staff. “Iranians Exercising… NADG
(7-11-19).
ADG Staff. “EU Tries to Rescue Iran Pact. Envoys Reluctant to Push Sanctions.” NADG
(7-16-19). Netanyahu’s fear mongering is
foregrounded—that the EU’s response to “Iranian violations” reminded him “of
the European appeasement of the 1930s.
There are probably some in Europe who will not wake up until Iranian
missiles fall on European soil.”
Megan Specia. (NYT). “Iran
Disputes Ship-Seizure Claim.” NADG (7-18-19).
Amir Vahdat. (AP). “Forced to Build Missiles, Iranian Says.” NADG (7-18-19).
D-G Staff. “US. Warship in Gulf Downs Iranian Drone. Trump Calls U.S. Response –Self-Defense.” NADG
(7-19-19). Imagine an Iranian warship in
Tampa Bay shooting down a US surveillance drone. Imagine too the warship was an amphibious assault vessel like the USS
Boxer. And imagine the ship was
accompanied outside the Bay by the full complement of a Carrier Strike Force
(like the one led by the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln presently in the Arabian
Sea). Now can you imagine US Central
Command not sending out a
surveillance drone? And imagine Iranian
news media describing the incident as part of the US “raising tensions” by
threatening Iranian forces and interests in the Gulf of Mexico. And throw in imagining four Iranian B-52
long-range bombers and Patriot air defense missiles to Cuba and Venezuela’. And, no imagining now, remember how close to violent
war the two nations came when on June 20, Trump ordered a retaliatory military
strike in retaliation for Iran shooting down a US Navy drone, but called it off
at the last moment. The authors of the
report, the D-G Staff, do not imagine how all of this might look to the
Iranians.
ANALYSES OF
MEDIA REPORTING IRAN
TWO ARTICLES
FROM FAIR AND A LTE
Shupak, US
mainstream media normalize imperial aggression and facilitate war by hyping a
threatening Iran.
Cho, US never breaks, breaches, or
violates its international agreements.
JULY 2, 2019
Creating a
Climate for War With Iran
Media outlets are creating a climate for a US military attack on
Iran by hyping the idea that Iran is an imminent threat to peace, by failing to
offer evidence that calls the US’s accusations against Iran into question, by
amplifying warmongers’ voices and by naturalizing America’s supposed right to
spy on every country on earth.
Headlines are breathlessly suggesting to readers that Iranians are
going to kill Americans if Americans don’t kill Iranians first.
A Hill article
(6/7/19) told readers “Why Congress Needs Accurate
Intelligence on the Iran Threat”; Fox (6/14/19) explained “The Trump Administration’s
Strategy to Meet Threat from Iran.” A New York Times article (6/17/19) by David E. Sanger called Iran one of the
“nuclear crises” facing the US, even though the International Atomic Energy
Agency has said that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and hasn’t been close
to having one since at least 2003, and there is reason to believe that it never has been close.
Presenting Iran
as a threat, nuclear or otherwise, over and over again carries the clear
message that it must be confronted. Yet it’s much more accurate to say that the
US is a threat to Iran than the opposite (FAIR.org, 6/6/19); after all, it’s the US government that is
destroying Iran’s economy through sanctions that limit Iranians’ access to food
and medicine, while surrounding Iran with military bases and land, sea and air
forces. Iran has done nothing remotely comparable to the US.
Media
outlets also create a climate for war when they fail to offer evidence that
contradicts US government narratives about Iran. Sanger’s supposedly neutral
piece of reporting in the Times (6/17/19) made three references to attacks on oil
tankers in the Gulf of Oman for which the US blames Iran, in one case implying
that readers should believe that Iran was responsible, writing:
Even the Democratic
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff, no
friend of Mr. Trump’s, says the evidence is overwhelming that Iran was
responsible for the attacks on the tankers.
Schiff may be “no
friend of Mr. Trump’s,” but that doesn’t necessarily make him a skeptic of
intelligence claims about official enemies; he voted to authorize force against
Iraq in 2002 on the basis of bogus intelligence claims that that country
possessed unauthorized weapons of mass destruction.
At no point did
the Sanger article mention the evidence that casts doubt on the claim that Iran
carried out the attacks—for instance, the owner of one of the tankers,
the Kokuka Courageous, said that it “was struck by a flying
projectile, contradicting reports by U.S. officials and the military” that a
mine was a source of the damage to the vessel.
Another
ostensibly objective Times report (6/20/19), this one on Trump’s apparent approval and
subsequent cancellation of a military attack after Iran shot down a US drone,
said that
United States officials
sought to bolster their case that Iran was responsible for last week’s tanker
attacks, telling journalists at a briefing that fragments recovered from one of
the tankers bore a “striking resemblance” to limpet mines used by Iran.
This account also
leaves out that, in addition to the statement from the owner of the Kokuka
Courageous, those aboard one of the other ships thought it was a torpedo that hit them.
The US has been worried
about international shipping through the strategic waterway since tankers were
damaged in May and June in what Washington has blamed on limpet mines from
Iran, although Tehran denied involvement. On Wednesday in the United Arab
Emirates, the US Navy showed fragments of mines that it said bore “a striking
resemblance” to those seen in Iran.
This article,
like the two from the Times, opted against noting the
above-mentioned flaws in the US’s account of the June tanker attacks, or
the strong political reasons for Iran to not carry
out these acts. Nor does the piece mention the shortage of evidence for US government
allegations that Iran damaged tankers in May.
Instead of
mentioning these elements of the story, the reports exclusively gave voice to
the US government’s version of events. Without the evidence that calls that
account into question, US/Iran relations are presented as a series of attacks
by Iran against the US and its partners—first oil tankers, and then a US
drone—which encourages people to see Iran as a violent aggressor that needs to
be dealt with violently. Providing readers with reasons to be skeptical about
US government claims that Iran is responsible for the tanker attacks both
undermines that master narrative, and can lead audiences to be suspicious about
all claims Washington is making about Iran.
More
directly, media outlets are creating a climate for war by giving megaphones to
right-wing ghouls explicitly calling for a US military attack on Iran.
A column by
the New York Times’ Bret Stephens (6/14/19) contended, “If Iran won’t change its
behavior, we should sink its navy.” The word “behavior” telegraphs how Stephens
presents Iran is a nation of children that needs to be disciplined by its
masters in the civilized world. He writes that “allowing Iran to go unpunished isn’t an
option. What is appropriate is a new set of rules — with swift consequences if
Iran chooses to break them. The Trump administration ought to declare new rules
of engagement to allow the Navy to engage and destroy Iranian ships or fast
boats that harass or threaten any ship, military or commercial, operating in
international waters. If Tehran fails to comply, the US should threaten to sink
any Iranian naval ship that leaves port.
If after that Iran still
fails to comply, we would be right to sink its navy, in port or at sea. The
world cannot tolerate freelance Somali pirates. Much less should it tolerate a
pirate state seeking to hold the global economy hostage through multiplying
acts of economic terrorism.”
In Stephens’
estimation, the US has the right to issue “a new set of rules” and, in the
event that Iran doesn’t “comply” with the US’s imperial fiats about the waters
off Iran’s shores, employ gunboat diplomacy to enforce them. Notice how quickly
he slides from “the US” in the first of these paragraphs to “the world” in the
second, as though these are one and the same. Interestingly, his definition of
“economic terrorism” seems only to include actions that Iran is accused of
taking but hasn’t been proven to have done, and not the full-scale destruction of the Iranian economy that the US has
embarked on in plain sight.
the US is somehow
responsible for Iran’s [alleged tanker attacks], a point made by…Trump critics. This kind of analysis is
leading to some bizarre policy recommendations. Already, European diplomats are urging Trump to drop his
campaign of maximum pressure and adopt one of “maximum restraint.”
This is asking to be
blackmailed. And now that Iran is threatening to exceed the limits to uranium
enrichment it agreed to in the 2015 nuclear deal, it’s more important than ever
to understand that restraint and dialogue will not bring Iran to heel.
For Lake,
Iranians are disobedient animals who the US should bring “to heel”—through
violence, a revolting prescription even when applied to actual misbehaving
animals. That the “2015 nuclear deal” is effectively null and void because the US tore it up is not the sort of
detail that troubles a war propagandist like Lake.
In the Washington
Post, Michael G. Vickers (6/21/19) argued that “the Trump administration should
respond to [the tanker episodes and Iran’s downing of the drone] with strikes
of its own on Iranian and Houthi air-defense assets, offensive missile systems
and Revolutionary Guard Corps bases,” on the grounds that “by reinforcing
deterrence, a short-duration US military operation may well help to prevent a
wider conflict with Iran.”
In effect, his
argument is that the best way to avoid a war with Iran is to have a war with
Iran, as well as ratcheting up the war on Yemen, as if the US and its
allies hadn’t done enough to Yemen already. What the US would be
“deter[ing]”—a word that appears four times in the article, including in its
headline—is Iran’s ability to interfere with the US capacity to spy on and bomb
the country: Vickers called for bombing “air-defense assets,” giving away that
his concern is with making Iran incapable, not merely of carrying out
hypothetical and extremely unlikely offensive attacks, but of exercising its
right to defend itself.
At no point does
Vickers, or the Associated Press story on the downing of the
drone, or the Times report (6/20/19) saying Trump approved and then called off
bombing Iran over the drone incident, or any corporate media article I can
find, question the assumption underlying the US government and much of the
media’s fulminating over Iran shooting down the drone: If the drone was shot
down in international airspace rather than over Iranian territory—and by no
means has this been proven—it’s an outrage for Iran to interfere with the US’s
divine right to spy on any nation it pleases, at any time and to any degree that
it wishes. Even if the US is telling the truth, its claim is that it was 21 miles off the Iranian coast with a drone that has “powerful surveillance
sensors to monitor ground or maritime activity in great detail.” It’s all but
impossible to imagine a scenario in which US media take for granted Iran’s
right to deploy powerful spy equipment 21 miles off the US coast. (That’s less
than the distance from Dallas to Ft. Worth, or from Tampa to St. Petersburg.)
And treating arguments for bombing countries like those from Lake,
Stephens and Vickers as though they are merely interesting ideas worthy of
consideration—rather than calls to carry out war crimes—normalizes imperialist
aggression. If the public is told that starting wars against other countries
with no credible pretext is a reasonable action, the likely outcome is that
ever more people will become inoculated against efforts to try to stop
potential and ongoing slaughters.
USA
Today (6/17/19)
describes Iran as planning to “break” an agreement that the US has already
renounced.
Quick
question: Does the US ever break, breach or violate its international
agreements?
Apparently
not, according to US coverage of Iran’s recent announcement that it intended to
go beyond the limits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in enriching uranium for its
civilian nuclear program (frequentlymischaracterized as
a nuclear weapons program in media coverage). Reading corporate media’s
inversion of reality, it’s hard to escape the impression that while Iran
betrays its international agreements, the US just leaves them behind.
An Associated
Press report carried by USA Today (6/17/19) was
headlined: “Iran Says It Will Break Uranium Stockpile Limit in 10 Days,” and
reported that Iran’s announcement indicated its “determination to break from
the landmark 2015 accord,” while noting that “tensions have spiked between Iran
and the United States,” partly because the US “unilaterally withdrew” from the
landmark agreement. Note that the US rejection of its obligations under the
deal is referred to in neutral terms—Washington “withdrew”—while Iran’s
response to US nonobservance gets negatively characterized as a “break”—a
pattern that persists throughout the coverage.
There
was no indication in the AP piece that Iran offered conditions
under which it would continue to comply with the Iran Deal (formally known as
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which gives the false impression that
Iran’s decision to end compliance with the JCPOA is settled and unconditional.
The Wall
Street Journal (6/17/19)
reports Iran will “breach” a pact that the US scuttled more than a year ago.
The Wall
Street Journal (6/17/19)
offered the same kind of misleading headline: “Iran to Breach Limits of Nuclear
Pact, as US to Send More Troops to the Middle East.” Again, Iran’s potential
departure from the pact whose terms the US has vitiated is portrayed as a
“breach,” while the US’s actual violation of the deal is labeled a “pullout” in
the accompanying piece.
The Journal,
unlike the AP, did note that Iran offered conditions under which it
would continue to comply with the JCPOA’s terms:
The
spokesman for Iran’s atomic energy agency, Behrouz Kamalvandi, said that by
June 27—10 days from Monday—the country would surpass its enriched-uranium
limits. He said Iran would further increase its production in early July, but
could reverse both steps if Europe provided relief from [US] sanctions.
CNN (6/17/19) went
with “Iran says it will break the uranium stockpile limit agreed under nuclear
deal in 10 days,” as their headline. Only people who read past the headline,
which most people don’t,
would’ve known that that’s not really what Iran is saying:
Iran
has reiterated that it could reverse the new measures should the remaining
European signatories in the nuclear deal (France, Germany and the United
Kingdom) step in and make more of an effort to circumvent US sanctions.
To
its credit, CNN added “withdraw” in addition to the usual “violate,”
“break” and “breach” in its list of words to describe Iran’s potential
departure compared with just “withdrew” to describe the US’s actions.
The New York Post (6/17/19)
chose “Iran Will Violate Nuclear Deal, Boost Uranium Stockpile” as the headline
to mislead readers, and kept with the pattern of describing the US’s JCPOA
breach as “pulling out of the deal.” However, unlike other reports, it didn’t
feature any sources skeptical of Iran’s responsibility for the recent Gulf of
Oman attacks on Japanese and Norwegian commercial oil tankers, despite crew
members aboard the Japanese Kokuka Courageous contradicting US allegations of
an Iranian mine attack by claiming to have been hit by a “flying object ,”
and European officials calling for further investigation
III. GENERAL
CRITICISM OF THE US WAR ON IRAN
DESPITE THE
BIASED REPORTING, MANY US CITIZENS SEE THE TRUTH AND DEMAND AN END TO US
AGGRESSION AGAINST IRAN
Contents
LTE from ARKie Reg Edwards
Veterans Against War
Petition to Congress
Essay Against Sanctions by
Dan Cohen
History of Iran, the 1950s
by Heather Gray
LTE
from Arkansas: Leave Iranians alone
Firstly: Iran is surrounded by nations with
nuclear weapons--Russia, Pakistan, Israel, and the U.S. fleet in the Strait of
Hormuz. So who are we to say they shouldn't have their own nuclear weapons?
Secondly: What would we say if the Iranians
had aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Mexico? Or possibly Long Island Sound? It
wasn't many years ago that a U.S. cruiser in the Strait of Hormuz shot down an
Iranian civilian airliner and killed all 200-plus people on board. Just who do
we think we are?
Seriously, folks, if an Iranian cruiser 100
miles off the American shore shot down a U.S. passenger aircraft and killed
everyone on board, what would we think of that? If the Iranian fleet was in the
Gulf of Mexico, what would we think of that? What would we do if Iranian drones
were flying close to our shore, spying on us--what would we do?
Time to stop our threats and bring the
military home. Why don't we try leaving the Iranians alone and stop bullying
them?
REG EDWARDS, Compton
NADG, 06/22/2019
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AGAINST SANCTIONS
Starvation
sanctions kill people. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have reportedly already died as a result of
this administration’s relentless assault on their economy; those human beings
are no less dead than they would have been if the US had killed them by
dropping cluster bombs on Caracas. Yet these deaths have received virtually no
mainstream media coverage, and Americans, while they strongly oppose attacking Iran militarily, have had
very little to say about Trump’s attacks on the nation’s economy. The economy
which people use to feed their children, to care for their elderly and their
sick.
I’m titling this essay
“Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare”, and I mean it. I am
not saying that starvation sanctions are more destructive or deadly than overt
military force in and of themselves; what I am saying is that the overall
effect is worse, because there’s no public accountability for them and because
they deliberately target civilians.
If the US were to launch
a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into an Iranian
suburb with the goal of killing civilians, there’d be international outrage and
the cohesion of the US-centralized power alliance would take a major hit.
Virtually everyone would recognize this as an unforgivable war crime. Yet
America will be able to kill the same number of civilians with the same
deliberate intention of inflicting deadly force, and it would suffer
essentially no consequences at all. There’s no public or international pressure
holding that form of violence at bay, because it’s invisible and poorly understood.
It reminds me of the way
financial abuse gets overlooked and under-appreciated in our society. Financial
abuse can be more painful and imprisoning than physical or psychological abuse
(and I speak from experience), especially if you have children, yet you don’t
generally see movies and TV shows getting made about it. In a society where
people have been made to depend on money for survival, limiting or cutting off
their access to it is the same as any other violent attack upon their personal
sovereignty, and can easily be just as destructive. But as a society we haven’t
yet learned to see and understand this violence, so it doesn’t attract interest
and attention. That lack of interest and attention enables the empire to launch
deadly campaigns targeting civilian populations unnoticed, without any public
accountability.
MIDDLE EAST HISTORY: ANOTHER REA\SON WHY IRANIANS AND
MIDDLE EASTERNERS MIGHT FEAR AND LOATHE THE USA: CIA OVERTHROW OF IRAN’S
ELECTED GOVERNMENT
Iran vs US arrogance
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12:07 PM (8 hours ago)
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IV. DICK’S NEWSLETTERS ON IRAN 2011-present
OMNI
IRAN NEWSLETTERS
COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE,
and ECOLOGY
(#11 Oct. 8, 2011; #12 Jan. 31, 2012; #13 Feb.
22, 2012; #14 Feb. 26, 2012; #15 March 17, 2012; #16 April 12, 2012; #17 May
21, 2012; #18, July 9, 2012; #19 August 13, 2012; #20 Sept. 10, 2012; #21, Dec.
14, 2012; #22 March 5, 2013; #23 Nov. 12, 2013; #24 March 5, 2014; #25 January
17, 2015; #26, July 28, 2015; #27, June 3, 2018; #28, June 21, 2019; #29, July 11,
2019; #30, July 19, 2019.)
CONTENTS: IRAN NEWSLETTER #29, July 11, 2019
OMNI’S NO IRAN
WAR DEMONSTRATIONS SATURDAYS 11AM, COURT HOUSE (Abel Tomlinson)
Contact Congress on War
Powers, Action
Support House Amendment to Curb Trump (J Street)
Cut Pentagon $$ (Peace Action)
Criticisms of US Aggression
Have We Learned Nothing from Iraq?
Jeremy Scahill, Col. Wilkerson (The Intercept)
Veterans for Peace
Against Sanctions
Take to the Streets
Congress for Peace
Representative Omar
Senator Bernie Sanders
The Iranian People Are Not
Our Enemies (Larison)
Democrats (Tveten)
US Empire by Economic
Siege
Johnstone, Starvation Sanctions Worse than Overt Warfare
Dan Beeton, Iran and
Venezuela
Donald Trump, Crushing
Iran
Iran Newsletter #28
CONTENTS, IRAN
NEWSLETTER, June 21, 2019, #28
NADG Reports on
Iran June 19-21
What’s at stake in Arkansas for war between US and Iran
What’s at stake in the world: United Nations Charter
Local direct
Action, Saturday June 22, Abel Tomlinson
National Actions
Win Wthout War
Peace Action
Ground Zero
Center
Iran No Threat, US the Threat
British General
Chris Ghika
Media Benjamin’s
Book, Inside Iran
Defending the US/Iran Nuclear Deal 2016
John Isaacs,
Council for a Liveable World
Win Without War
Repelling the
Warmongers
From 2016 to 2019, US and Iran Peace to Threatened War
Stephen Zunes,
5-15-19
Peace Action,
Stop Trump, 5-22-19
NADG Iran
Headlines
Contents: Iran Newsletter #27, June 3, 2018
These publications prepare us to resist
US malignant hostility toward Iran. If
you are short of time, I have put up front two brief essays and an easily read
book: Art’s column, Gray’s essay, and
Benjamin’s book.
History of US Aggression Against Iran and Nuclear Diplomacy
Art Hobson, Trump’s Disastrous Choice and
Danger to World Peace (2018)
Heather Gray 2018, Background: CIA Overthrow of Elected Leader
Mosaddeq in 1953
Mosaddeq in 1953
Media Benjamin, Inside Iran (2018)
Ghamari, The Iranian Revolution
Porter, the Iranian Nuclear Program
Parsi, Obama and Iran Nuclear Deal
Tabatabai, Trump v. the Deal
The
Nation, May 21, Save the Deal
US ANTI-IRAN PROPAGANDA and MILITARY THREATENING CONTINUE in the NADG
Gore Vidal
Entekhabifard, Iranian POV
Satires by Dick Bennett
Iran is a
theocracy. Do we hear enough from US Christian
leaders regarding US treatment of Iran?
Is the role of Israel and Zionism sufficiently reported in these
articles of April-July 2019.
Jesus said in Matthew, “Love
your enemies, do good to those who hate you…” He proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount,
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Readers, ask your minister to speak out
against the violence of your president.
END IRAN
NEWSLETTER #30, JULY 19, 2019
