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Iran and Historical Forgetting

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This has certainly been the case with North Korea, another regime we pillory with charges of insanity. It has a number of nuclear weapons it could deliver to South Korea easily. Why aren't we threatening North Korea with bombings? Why are we instead offering them shipments of food?

 

Because the real reason Iran is in the sights of the United States and, especially, Israel is clear. As a tax-paying American citizen who did his small part to make the unnecessary historic debacle known as the Vietnam War what it was, I submit the problem is that both the United States and Israel operate on mythic fuel that deludes their citizens into believing they are exceptional and the chosen people, respectfully. They have been hookwinked by politicos and holy men with inadequate and distorted historical thinking into believing Iran is the devil inherent intent on menacing the poor, innocent west.

 

This irrational, mythic bunk is how we tend to see the rest of the world, and it has gotten so out of hand these days that instead of questioning the utility of these myths our political and cultural leaders actually nurture and reinforce them, making the situation even worse. And since the mainstream media and both political parties are complicit, the smart American voter who might on his or her own see the utility of breaking this doomed cycle is presented with no political choice at all.

 

Sure, one of the candidates will be better than the other on something (for this reason, I always vote), but when it comes to the really big issues of Militarism and the growth of Police State Tyranny, there's no choice at all. The American citizen is stuck on a runaway train.

 

Because he doesn't play by this book, former Member of British Parliament George Galloway has the temerity to ask, "What has Iran ever done to us?" On a recent radio show Galloway debated a caller who gave the middle-brow line about the need to attack Iran. Galloway pointed out that Iranians are very capable and sophisticated and that they will take a strategic bombing campaign as a declaration of war and act accordingly by retaliating against us with bombs wherever and whenever they can.

 

People who think a strategic bombing attack on Iran will be like the Israeli attack on Saddam's plant back in the 1980s or the Israeli attack on a Syrian plant a couple years ago are delusional. Galloway says it clearly: "If we bomb Iran, Iran will bomb us back." The listener absurdly responds by saying that's why we need to bomb them. Galloway throws up his hands: "There are people listening to this who will not know whether to laugh or cry." The listener doesn't grasp any of the history and is operating purely on fear and the delusion that somehow bombing Iran will lessen the danger that nation poses to the United States, Israel and the West. It's like never having heard of the concepts of overconfidence and unforeseen consequences. I'm a member of Veterans For Peace and we like to say, "War are easy to start but very difficult to stop." So the idea is not to start them and to work out problems another way.

 

No one in power listened to this kind of thing back in 2003 as the war drums were being beaten for the invasion of Iraq. The basic message of the antiwar movement -- that invasion would lead to disaster and was not necessary to contain Saddam -- was ignored and ridiculed by both the government and the mainstream media. A government that had not even been properly elected relied on delusion, secrecy and outright lies to scare the American people into passivity so it could have its invasion. The antiwar movement was like Cassandra, the Greek prophetess the gods cursed with the exasperating dilemma of speaking truth that would not be heeded.

 

The creeping police-state the Bush regime created still exists and continues to grow at a fearsome pace, feeding on itself and becoming more stealthy and sophisticated every year. Too many of our leaders seem to feel comfortable with this situation and with the idea of going to war with Iran.

 

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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