In the midst of trying my luck again with graduate schools, I'm trying to find a little time to practice some writing by making another handful of these entries. Here goes nothing!
U.S. officials and presidential hopefuls have been opening their mouths about Iran recently, an event which usually causes me significant distress and even brings on occasional bouts of quiet weeping in my cubicle. I realize that no influential decision-maker can know enough about every topic to always make the most informed decisions, but Iran is one of the few areas that I know just enough about to know when people are talking straight of their asses, and it's just so blatantly obvious with some of the latest stories I'm reading. Take this golden quote from presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, uttered without even cracking a smile (I didn't actually see the bastard say it, but I have a sinking feeling he did in fact maintain a straight face) at the Fox News debate a few weeks ago:
"Iran is a country that has been at war with us since 1979. Iran is a country that has killed more American men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Iraqis and the Afghans have. The Iranians are the existential threat to the state of Israel."
This is wrong, wrong, wrong, and one of the oldest and laziest canards regarding Iran. In fact, the reverse is true: Among the least cynical and malevolent ways in which the U.S. has been torturing Iran are the economic sanctions, the presumption behind which is that life for ordinary people will eventually become so unbearable that they will overthrow their government, supposedly having either ignored or forgotten that the foreign powers had a direct hand in their decades of misery all along. Additionally, the meddling by foreign powers gives the government more excuses to crack down on social and political freedoms, making a bad situation worse. We openly supported Saddam in his war of aggression with Iran in the 80s, we've supported internal and international terrorist organizations, we've invaded and indefinitely occupied the two countries on either side of them, we've loaded the Persian Gulf and surrounding areas with nuclear subs and warships (Google "Diego Garcia") and we're backing them into a corner and violating the UN charter with threats of military action over the nuclear program issue while we let regimes of essentially the same stripe stock up on who-knows-what completely unchecked.
I suppose Santorum gets a point for getting the year of the revolution correct and presumably spelling his name correctly at the beginning of the debate, but forgetting the history of sanctions and threats of invasion after the revolution, as well as the decades of rule by the shah before that is a pretty big oversight and a classic example of our tendency toward highly selective memory. Santorum's concern for Israel is also unnecessary, unfounded and goes against the opinion of the Israeli Defense Minister.
I suppose Santorum gets a point for getting the year of the revolution correct and presumably spelling his name correctly at the beginning of the debate, but forgetting the history of sanctions and threats of invasion after the revolution, as well as the decades of rule by the shah before that is a pretty big oversight and a classic example of our tendency toward highly selective memory. Santorum's concern for Israel is also unnecessary, unfounded and goes against the opinion of the Israeli Defense Minister.
Santorum's comment was in response to a statement by Ron Paul in which he stressed the need for the U.S. to withdraw from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also made a simple observation, but nonetheless one which hadn't occurred to me: The Soviet Union may have been a much greater threat to the U.S. and certainly had nuclear weapons, yet we never attacked them. The unilateral, imperialist arrogance that has dominated our foreign policy and discourse for a decade or so now has become so normalized that nobody blinks when Santorum and others like him express indignation that another country would "interfere" with U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, as Jon Stewart and others have pointed out, a voice of reason on this issue is getting next to no airtime:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier | ||||
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Since substantive discussion of issues does not fit into the media narrative of the presidential hopefuls as the cast of the latest reality TV show, suggestions of actual policy changes will go unreported until the next election (and who am I kidding, after it as well), with the public none the wiser. The comments made by Santorum, as well as more sinister forms of drum-beating for military intervention, will continue to be posited as regular, acceptable discourse and given credibility for the next 14 or so months, the thought of which thrills me to no end.
President Ahmadinejad is due to speak at the U.N. in New York again fairly soon, something which always brings with it a torrent of misinformation, media deception/laziness, and manipulative propaganda from our elected (or would-be elected) officials and news media personalities. A colorful cast of characters has been pushing for the Mujahedin-e Khalq to be taken off of the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a story which I will try to update myself on and summarize later this week.
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