Hatin’ on Mahmoud

The reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to the United States revealed some uncomfortable truths about the servility of the “free press” to the interests of power.

His reception consisted primarily of macho chest-thumping and tribal outrage at his “mind of evil” (oh yes, that’s a quote), which found wide expression in the good ol’ Adolf Hitler comparison – Ahmadinejad was Hitler for, among many others, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Newt Gingrich, the Daily News and David Horowitz (a political advisor to Republican Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani), who described him as “the Persian Hitler”. “Not to mention he’s a Nazi,” Horowitz added. “Not to mention he wants to kill all the Jews”. (Some Jews, at least, appear to disagree with him on this point).

The Washington Times editorialised that, “[n]ot since the days of Adolf Hitler and  the Third Reich has a head of state spoken as openly about the destruction of Jewish people”, whilst the New York Post declared him a “thug”, a “despot” and a “bloody handed villain”. Interviewing Ahmadinejad for CBS’ ’60 Minutes’, Scott Pelley plunged new journalistic depths, channeling the Bush administration to ask such ‘questions’ as “Mr. President, American men and women are being killed by your weapons in Iraq. You know this”, and “Mr. President, you say that the two nations are very close to one another, but it is an established fact now that Iranian bombs and Iranian know-how are killing Americans in Iraq. You have American blood on your hands. Why?”

The New York Times and the Washington Post did their bit, repeatedly accusing Ahmadinejad of threatening to have Israel “wiped off the map” – a lie that has long been comprehensively debunked.

Of course, the moral outrage is totally cynical. University of Columbia president Lee Bollinger bagged his 15 minutes of fame by introducing Ahmadinejad – an invited guest at the University – as a “petty and cruel dictator”. Yet in 2005, the very same Lee Bollinger introduced Pakistani military dictator and gross human rights abuser Pervez Musharraf in positively glowing terms:

“President Musharraf is a leader of global importance and his contribution to Pakistan’s economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable – it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus”. (h/t the Angry Arab)

When Ariel Sharon, a war criminal and serial human rights abuser, visited the U.S. he faced no media outcry – his request to visit the site of the World Trade Center was not rejected and he wasn’t likened to Hitler. Similarly, those who this week denounced Ahmadinejad ever-so courageously for his human rights abuses were curiously silent when the Crown Prince of one the most extreme fundamentalist, oppressive dictatorships in the world met Bush at his Texas ranch for a friendly chat in 2005. As bad as Iran’s record on human rights is, that is evidently not the reason for the recent anti-Ahmadinejad hysteria.

Musharraf, Sharon, Prince Abdullah and Ahmadinejad are all repressive authoritarians. The crucial difference between them is that Ahmadinejad is an official enemy, while the others are U.S. clients. Put simply: Iran is in the cross-hairs and the establishment press is falling in line.

Iran is a target not because it poses any real threat to the security of either Israel or the United States. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly stressed that “Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat to the international community” – such insolence has earned him hit-pieces from both the New York Times and the Washington Post, which branded him a “rogue regulator” who needs to learn his place. Iran has undergone the most extensive IAEA inspections of any country in history, and no nuclear weapons programme has been found. Furthermore, Iran would pose no security threat to the U.S. or Israel even if it had nuclear weapons – both countries possess more than enough firepower to deter an Iranian attack.

Neither is Iran a target because of some principled desire to spread democracy and freedom – as mentioned above, some of the U.S.’ firmest allies are tyrannical dictatorships. As Barry Grey writes,

“the Iranian government is in no essential way different, or more repressive, than a whole number of bourgeois regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia with which the United States is allied – from Mubarak’s Egypt, to Musharraf’s military dictatorship in Pakistan, to the oil sheikdoms in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.”

In fact, the campaign of hostility being whipped up by the U.S. against Iran is firmly opposed by Iranian democrats. As Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading political dissident, wrote in a recent open letter to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

“Far from helping the development of democracy, US policy over the past fifty years has consistently been to the detriment of the proponents of freedom and democracy in Iran. The 1953 coup against the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and the unwavering support for the despotic regime of the Shah, who acted as America’s gendarme in the Persian Gulf, are just two examples of these flawed policies. More recently the confrontation between various US administrations and the Iranian state over the past three decades has made internal conditions very difficult for the proponents of freedom and human rights in Iran.

Exploiting the danger posed by the US, the Iranian regime has put military-security forces in charge of the government, shut down all independent domestic media and is imprisoning human rights activists on the pretext that they are all agents of a foreign enemy. The Bush Administration, for its part, by approving a fund for democracy assistance in Iran, which has in fact been largely spent on official institutions and media affiliated with the US government, has made it easy for the Iranian regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them with impunity.

At the same time, even speaking about “the possibility” of a military attack on Iran makes things extremely difficult for human rights and pro-democracy activists in Iran. No Iranian wants to see what happened to Iraq or Afghanistan repeated in Iran. Iranian democrats also watch with deep concern the support in some American circles for separatist movements in Iran. [my emph.]”

Ganji continued,

“In order to help the process of democratization in the Middle East, the US can best help by promoting a just peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, and pave the way for the creation of a truly independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.

A just resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state would inflict the heaviest blow on the forces of fundamentalism and terrorism in the Middle East.”

When American politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, vow to keep military action against Iran “on the table” – a violation of the UN Charter in itself – they are actively hurting pro-democracy activists inside Iran.

Iran is a target for the same reason Iraq was a target: the U.S. wants control over its energy resources. Controlling oil reserves has long been recognised by state planners to give a country “veto power” over its rivals – the U.S.’ worst nightmare in the Middle East is, to quote Noam Chomsky,

“A loose Shi’ite alliance controlling most of the world’s oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East, where China and others are eager to make relationships with them, and are already doing it.”

As the National Security Council explained (.pdf) in 1952, Iran is strategically important because of its “petroleum resources”, which if controlled by the Soviets would “[p]ermit communist denial to the free world of access to Iranian oil and seriously threaten the loss of other Middle Eastern oil” – of course, what was true for the Soviets then is equally applicable to America today.

Whether or not the U.S. will bomb Iran is debatable – the military and intelligence community is largely opposed to the idea, for starters – but it is enough to know that it is being seriously considered and planned for in high-level circles. As Prof. Juan Cole notes,

“It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S. troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S. troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government — a government Iran actually supports — could lay the groundwork for a war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident spinning out of control.”

Frustrated at the lack of public support for an attack, the neocons in Washington are upping the propaganda war – Afghanistan specialist Barry Rubin reports that, according to a well-placed source, Dick Cheney has issued “instructions” to “roll out a campaign for war with Iran…coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects…designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained.” The performance of the mainstream media this week confirmed once again their reliability as stenographers for power, so we can expect to see plenty more stories like this over the coming months.

Cross-posted at The Heathlander