Iraq’s
Colonial Occupier, The US, Denounces “Foreign Meddling”
By David Walsh
31 January, 2007
World
Socialist Web
In recent weeks US government
and military officials, aided and abetted by the American media, have
stepped up the war of words against Iran. As they did precisely four
years ago, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the political and
media establishment is attempting to build up a case for military action
against a country that has no designs on American territory and represents
no threat to the US population.
The campaign of misinformation
is proceeding as though the claims about weapons of mass destruction
and Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda had never been exposed as lies. The
Bush administration has no credibility whatsoever in its new propaganda
campaign against Iran. Indeed, it is viewed by broad layers of the world’s
population as a criminal outfit, bound and determined to impose its
will against all opposition. This does not prevent the US mass media
from transmitting the administration’s latest claims as the gospel
truth.
One of the most outrageous
aspects of the current offensive is the contention, repeated innumerable
times by various US officials, that Iran has to be prevented from “meddling”
in Iraqi affairs. The superpower responsible for the deaths of countless
Iraqi citizens over the past decade and a half and the virtual disintegration
of Iraqi society through war, sanctions and invasion, which currently
has 150,000 troops stationed on Iraqi soil, has the gall to accuse others
of “interference.” In fact, nothing has been more catastrophic
for the Iraqi people in history than its encounter with American “meddling.”
The Ahmadinejad regime in
Tehran is of course pursuing its interests in Iraq. One might point
out that its hand has been immeasurably strengthened by the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a puppet government in Baghdad
with a strong pro-Iranian, Shiite representation, but that is another
matter.
The American propaganda effort
is directed toward justifying an expansion of the war in the Middle
East and furthering US plans to establish control over the region’s
vast energy reserves. Everything else is mere dust in the public’s
eyes.
The current campaign began
in earnest with George W. Bush’s January 10 speech during which
he warned that American military forces would “seek out and destroy
the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies
in Iraq.” US troops raided the Iranian consulate in Irbil in northern
Iraq the next day, seizing five Iranian nationals. No evidence has been
presented about their activities.
Last week it was learned
that the American military has a policy of hunting down and killing
Iranian government personnel working in Iraq. Bush defended this policy
last Friday, stating, “It makes sense that if somebody is trying
to harm our troops or stop us from achieving our goal, or killing innocent
citizens in Iraq, that we will stop them.”
Vice President Cheney has
been one of the most vociferous of the attack dogs on this front. Following
Bush’s initial comments and the provocative raid in Irbil he told
the press that the US government thought it was very important that
the Iranians should “keep their folks at home.”
Cheney went on to say that
Tehran was “fishing in troubled waters” by allegedly aiding
attacks on US forces and backing Shiite militias involved in sectarian
violence. “I think the message that that the president sent clearly,”
remarked the vice president, “is that we do not want [Iran] doing
what they can to try to destabilize the situation inside Iraq.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley have issued similar
warnings about Iranian and Syrian efforts to “destabilize”
Iraq. American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalizad, according to a news
report, recently indicated that Iran should “keep its hands off”
Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to the Los Angeles Times,
“reiterated that he believed the problem of Iranian interference
could be dealt with inside Iraq, without crossing the border.”
National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe asserted that Iran
was playing a “destructive role in the affairs of Iraq.”
In his recent appearance before a congressional committee, the new US
military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, denounced “the
threats posed by Iranian and Syrian meddling in Iraq.”
Various claims are being
floated about Iranian activity by the US government and military through
their mouthpieces in the media. In Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Mark
Hosenball claim that Iran is providing the insurgents with electronic
sensors, “which cost as little as $1 a piece,” used in improvised
explosive devices. The proof? “Recent reports from US intelligence
agencies show that Iranian agents or brokers have ordered the devices
in bulk from manufacturers in the Far East, said one US counterterrorism
official, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.”
Isikoff and Hosenball continue,
“In recent weeks, the Bush administration, along with the government
of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has made increasingly dramatic
assertions about Iranian interference in Iraq—alleging the existence
of a pipeline that flows between Iran and Shia extremists who have been
implicated in attacks on US troops.”
Iranian Revolutionary Guards
are actively training insurgents in Iraq. The Iranians are providing
financing for the Shiite militias. The Iranians are supplying information
on explosive formed projectiles, etc.
The media echoes the Pentagon’s
claims without comment and adopts its language. Terence Hunt of the
Associated Press writes, “The White House says there has been
growing evidence over the last several months that Iran is supporting
terrorists inside Iraq and is a major supplier of bombs and other weapons
used to target US forces.” Reuters comments, “The United
States has also accused Iran of fueling instability in Iraq, and President
George W. Bush on Friday warned Iranians that they would be stopped
if they attacked US or Iraqi forces inside Iraq.” ABC News reports
breathlessly, “Out of all the enemies the United States faces
in Iraq, the most troubling ones come from Iran, and according to US
officials, the Pentagon will soon present evidence that Iran is providing
deadly weapons to insurgents.”
Again, one has to consider
both the source of the message and the character of the messenger. The
US government claimed that the Hussein regime already possessed substantial
quantities of deadly chemical and biological weapons, that it was seeking
to possess nuclear weapons and that Iraq was directly or indirectly
behind the September 11 suicide attacks in New York City and Washington.
The American media obediently passed on these claims as facts to the
public, facilitating the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, with
disastrous results. Why should the reports about Iranian activity be
given the slightest credence?
However, even if every report
were true, the level of Iranian “interference” in a neighboring
country would not even register on any objective measuring device when
compared to the systematic havoc wreaked on Iraq by American imperialism
over the past fifteen years.
Leaving aside US and CIA
intervention in Iraq during the postwar years and Washington’s
support for the Hussein regime in its suppression of left-wing opponents
and its murderous war with Iran in the 1980s, the Gulf War in 1991 did
incalculable damage to Iraq.
The US military dropped 88,500
tons of bombs on Iraq and Kuwait in one and a half months. The attack
destroyed essential infrastructure, electrical and water supply facilities
in particular, as part of a deliberate strategy. One million rounds
of depleted uranium were also used during the conflict, with horrifying
consequences for the Iraqi population and many US military personnel.
The US Defense Department
estimated that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded
in the Gulf war. The civilian death toll is unknown; Washington had
no interest in exploring the issue. According to Business Week, in 1991
US Census Bureau demographer Beth Osborne Daponte arrived at the following
estimates: “13,000 civilians were killed directly by American
and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from
war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric
power grid, and the water system.”
Daponte, who was fired by
the Census Bureau for allegedly publishing “false information,”
but fought the case and won her job back, has since revised her estimates,
concluding that “205,500 Iraqis died in the war and postwar period,”
Business Week reports.
The first conflict was followed
by 12 years of devastating sanctions. A report by UNICEF and the Iraqi
Health Ministry in 1999 estimated that there would “have been
half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as
a whole during the 8-year period 1991 to 1998.”
The war against Iraq never
stopped. The bombings continued under the Clinton administration, during
Operation Desert Strike in September 1996 and Operation Desert Fox in
December 1998, for example, as the US military enforced its so-called
‘no-fly’ zones.
Then came the US-led invasion
in March 2003 and the occupation of the country. Entire cities where
resistance to the US colonial occupation was particularly fierce, like
Fallujah, have been leveled. And American policy has consciously stoked
up sectarian divisions with horrifying results. In October 2006, the
British medical journal Lancet published a study suggesting that the
most recent American intervention was responsible for the deaths of
an estimated 655,000 Iraqis. The study, carried out according to the
most up-to-date research methods, was conducted by a team of Iraqi physicians
under the direction of epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s
Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.
In pursuit of a stranglehold
over oil supplies, American capitalism has declared war on Iraqi society.
When Cheney and the others speak angrily about foreign “meddling”
they are no doubt entirely sincere; they see nothing untoward about
an occupying power complaining about “outside interference.”
To the US ruling elite, and its most prominent thugs like Cheney, the
entire globe is an American possession, especially its oil-rich regions.
America’s “national interest,” to this way of thinking,
endows it with the right to interfere at will in any spot on the planet,
while denouncing any other regime’s activity as impermissible
and “destabilizing.”
Not everyone in the media
is acting like an amnesiac. Even if they are fully capable of carrying
out the same operation in regard to Iran as they did in relation to
Iraq, certain figures in the media recognize that the popular mood has
changed dramatically. They feel the need at least to explain why this
time the US government should be believed.
On January 28 the New York
Times’ David Sanger published a piece headline “On Iran,
Bush faces haunting echoes of Iraq,” which began, “As President
Bush and his aides calibrate how directly to confront Iran, they are
discovering that both their words and their strategy are haunted by
the echoes of four years ago—when their warnings of terrorist
activity and nuclear ambitions were clearly a prelude to war. This time,
they insist, it is different.”
On CNN Monday morning, Pentagon
correspondent Barbara Starr presented as unimpeachable evidence the
various claims of the US military and State Department about Iran’s
nefarious doings in Iraq. Anchorman Miles O’Brien mildly pointed
out, “Of course, Barbara, the Bush administration has a little
credibility problem with this, given the faulty intelligence in the
run-up to the war in Iraq. How are they going to get around that?”
Starr replied, “Well, it’s very clear that that is one stumbling
block at this point, especially at the State Department, where they
are very aware that their, you know, claims of WMD in Iraq didn’t
prove to be true. What officials say is this time it is different.”
There are differences, but
insatiable US geopolitical ambitions, the American elite’s ability
to lie to advance those aims and the media’s willingness to go
along with the lies remain the same.
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