Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [1/2 + 2/2]
[two part coloumn originally published in the Whitehorse Star, 3/4 May 2018]
Western countries engage in a stubborn, century-long campaign of anti-Iranian aggression. U.S. President Donald Trump, aside to blustering, so far provides more continuity than change to the legacies of previous U.S. administrations.
Enter Barack Obama, who in 2015 furnished JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) as touch stone in the way of an anti-Iranian good cop/bad cop routine by which trigger-happy Democrats and bellicose Republicans are let lose to outdo each other in their usual sew-saw, pro-war dialogue.
By legitimizing the bomb lie to a wider public with the deceptive JCPOA, Obama perhaps did more than Trump or George W. Bush to tether down Iran as target for regime change and aggressive war to steal their oil.
Looking at the basics, bringing back a dose of objectivity might be helped by stepping away for a moment from unexamined assumptions that lack critical thinking, such as Obama policies as a given force for good or step in the right direction.
Unfortunately even highly experienced and competent observers, among them Gareth Porter, can’t quite get out from under the shadow of Obama’s marketing genius (Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, 2014).
It also means Mr. Porter doesn’t live by his own minutiously assembled evidence for an all-out deception and Iran demonization in JCPOA, when, in disjointed conclusion, he even now supports the toxic deal to supposedly have a positive impact.
Mr. Porter with his detailed evaluation and fact-finding, is joining the likes of Seymour Hersh in clearly demonstrating proof that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and no ambitions for one. Among sources to back up their findings are US and Israeli intelligence services.
( goo.gl/muxL5N Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, 6 June 20011
goo.gl/nHV9y8 James Risen, Mark Mazzetti, New York Times 24 Feb. 2012
goo.gl/ixt1Yw Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill, Clayton Swisher, Israel Spy Cables, 23 Feb. 2015).
Best hope against brinksmanship of the war mongers:
Intelligence services with governments most at risk to talk themselves into illegal shooting wars, had learned a lesson since Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair furnished fabricated phoney weapons of mass destruction evidence against Saddam Hussein in 2002/2003. And have developed a habit of going to the media while there is time.
Obama had acted toward Iran like a lawyer pressuring guilty plea bargains, in the way of a racialized class justice, on those innocent of what they are accused of, as trade-in for a shortened but lifelong besmirching prison sentence.
At gunpoint, Obama threatened, cajoled and blackmailed Iran to sign the JCPOA deal, backed up by a dangling and teasing of sanctions relief paired in the real world with ever-widening sanctions, naval blockades and other ongoing war measures.
A plea bargain deal by which Iran in effect confesses to nuclear weapons programs or ambitions with global reach, which it never had, and to regional deterrence, which it doesn't and didn't pursue, verifiably at least since 2003, according to consistent US and Israeli intelligence findings.
The thrust of JCPOA is non-co-operative and different to the Non-Proliferation Treaty because it singled out Iran for future regime change and, in essence, re-enforced Obama's doubling down on the criminal Bush Doctrine for aggressive wars.
With President Trump, and his advisor, John Bolton, in the Whitehouse, willing to cash in Obama’s pre-emptive war crime option, legitimized and implicit in the JCPOA narrative, the deal may have to be paid for dearly, rather sooner than later.
Colin Powell former chief of staff, Colonel Wilkerson, pointed at another often overlooked function of the JCPOA, to recruit a coalition of the willing to attack Iran
( goo.gl/RBZ5Cs Laurence Wilkerson, U.S. News & World Report, 20 Aug. 2015).
Part 2/2 examines the warlike attitude of Western countries towards Iran in the context of petroleum economics, geopolitical and cultural fault-lines.
Peter Becker, Whitehorse
Obama Regime Change Deal frames Iran with Fiction Nukes [2/2]
Part one of my commentary shed light on the Orwellian content of the Iran nuclear deal and the language it projects, which claims to protect peace when the real purpose is to “let slip the dogs of war” (Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar”).
The old agenda of stealing the Iranian peoples' oil has, if anything become more deadly in the 2015 Barack Obama regime change deal, than with the violent British/American coup in 1953 (Operation Ajax).
The Iranian leadership is suspicious about a continuous regime change agenda based on the underlying objective of stealing Iran's oil, but perhaps makes the mistake of not being suspicious enough.
An Iranian misjudgement in signing JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is conceivable, partly from the vantage point of honest business characteristics in their conventional oil extraction.
It seems possible to underestimate just how deceptive and dangerous the North American unconventional and economically wounded oil cartel beast has become, business converted into ideology.
One can get a sense when examining U.S. and Canadian tar and frack crude extraction, which has a marginal production cost of around $100 to 150 per barrel compared with $10 - 15 for profitable Iranian conventional oil.
North American oil cartels are heavily subsidized by carbon-pricing talk and policies, have morphed into a market-hostile, economically damaging mirage of an oil and gas industry that generates a creeping energy security/affordability crisis, structural unemployment, run away government debt, climate melt down and defrauds investors.
These backgrounds are well documented by independent oil & gas analysts ranging from Deborah Rogers to David Hughes and Art Berman, to studies of energy economics including from EUROSOLAR, the Indigenous Environmental Network, IEA, the IPCC, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 100-per-cent renewable lightning-speed conversion plans by Sussex and Stanford universities.
There are also entrenched cultural misunderstandings at play. It has been observed by Western scholars that apparently the Iranian mullahs feel their religion of Shia Islam does not permit the pursuing of nuclear weapons and other WMDs.
During the Western-backed and armed Iraq attack on Iran (1980-88), including by way of chemical weapons, Iran deliberately never responded with chemical weapons.
The Imam Ali, founder of the Shia branch of islam, who set down that “People are brothers in religion or brothers in humanity” is much loved in Iran.
Such moral teachings tend not to be restraint into academical or quasi-ecclesiastical confines, but evolve with a presence in everyday life.
After all, science says atom bombs are insane and not feasible, in terms of deterrence or nuclear winter.
By contrast it seems that in a Western mainstream interactions of man’s tools with the world have not been mythologically updated for a very long time, not perhaps since Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ”Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.
Somehow spiritual death has settled in to such a degree that our elites and leadership can no longer even imagine such a big priority position, by of course flawed human beings, and to be guided not from a hollow dogma of frozen utilitarianism, but from a living ethical core.
Yes the JCPOA is installed, but energizing and covering up its evil direction with endorsements reminds of so-called liberals that still have not accounted for enabling Bill Clinton’s war crimes in Iraq during the ‘90s.
Clinton, silver-tongued, much like Obama, launched sanctions, naval blockades and bombs that, in Clinton’s case, killed more Iraqi children than the sum of two Bush presidents’ actions.
Accelerated escalations by the Trump administration, decertifying the JCOPA by May 12 or not, achieve traction that is enabled by Trump critics, who hide the pro-war long game and oil robbery meaning of Obama’s regime change deal.
The deal’s drawn out actual legal content, of vast fabrications and unsubstantiated accusations, in its inertia of war propaganda is available to Trump, wether the JCPOA stays in place or not.
Opposers falsely claim the deal enables a nuclear threat supposedly posed by Iran. Defenders say that it protects peace while equally demonizing Iran with false nuke ambitions.
On his recent visit to Washington French President Emmanuel Macron demonstrated how to work Obama’s Iran deal synergistically.
Aside from a bit of showmanship performance of teasing Trump to get back in line with the deal, he went on to effortlessly explain away any difference between the Bush-Obama-Trump (supplementary) positions, as there really are none of substance.
During his White House visit, Macron kicked into gear an all-out consolidation of the pro and contra duality of the deal perception, leaving dissenters of a potential war on Iran with their pants down, the point of the Obama Iran exercise to begin with.
(When coming up with up privatized Obamacare to push back Medicare majority ambitions, Obama had already proved a master of setting up such neoliberal Catch-22 traps)
Most everybody, pro or contra, has effectively been coopted into the JCPOA war agenda by their unaware complicity in disguising the deal’s actual direction.
However, there is no excuse for wimpish or feeble-minded validations of the Obama war deal, wether it stays in place or evaporates.
Letting go of those by exposing its true pro-war core, logically works towards deflating Trump’s immediate war threat by pulling out the rug from underneath it.
Obama’s regime change deal already has generated geopolitical reverberations, lives lost and harms that cannot be undone, also by escalating the Syrian war more and more into an anti-Iranian and anti-Russian proxy war.
Others are picking up the slack, more recently induced through the vacuums of Trump diplomacy
— such as the social-democratic former Italian foreign affairs minister Federica Mogherini who is also a promoter and deceiver on the war agenda of JCPOA.
In 2014 the European Union appointed her as liaison envoy with a security mandate that since amounted to a recruiting tour de force in tightening and escalating the NATO encirclement of Russia, and increasingly of China.
Those with or without illusions on the Iran deal should pay attention also to an increasingly explicit projection, through the JCPOA lens, of European/American aggressive colonial powers against Russia’s, Iran’s and Syria’s sovereign relations.
Such dangerous geopolitical destabilization efforts are brought forward during G7 meetings as we speak, including by Macron, Donald Trump, British Prime MinisterTheresa May and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The very same coalition of countries that in 1918 -1920 gratuitously attacked and invaded their First World War ally Russia, a bottomless treachery that likely caused the death of millions.
Rosa Luxemburg, a peace advocate and socialist organizer, had pointed at the cowardice of Social Democratic Party executives, especially in Germany, when through years prior to “The Guns of August” (the Barbara Tuchman book) in 1914 they betrayed their own iron-clad solidarity and peace contract with the people and switched sides to the war powers and death industries.
William Butler Yeats knew what he talked about in his 1919 poem The Second Coming. The last lines of the first stanza seem especially foreboding and encapsulating a cowardly, softheaded kind of complicity with escalating wars so that the carnage never ends:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Within the neoliberal one-party substance, lefties instinctively come across as even more dishonest than the right-wing populists along with the by name only liberal centrists, with their half-transparent gangsterism.
Time and again, populations tend to dismiss the by vanity/identity politics disguised wussy avant-garde.
Peter Becker is a Canadian writer and researcher who works in Whitehorse (donations welcome: paypal.me/yukonblogger )
