There are times I'll see or read something that immediately causes a double-take. That something occurred this morning when I came across this headline in the Washington Post that read, "Iranian Threat to Navy Grows, Tehran Expands Arsenal in Gulf, U.S. might suffer losses in a conflict's first hours."
It wasn't the idea that the U.S. might suffer losses or that the Iranians are beefing up their defenses in the Persian Gulf that gave me the "What is this" reaction. But the double-take surely had to do with the idea of an "Iranian threat" to the U.S. Navy.
I mean just who is threatening who, not only in the in the Persian Gulf but attempting to strangle the country economically with horrific sanctions?
If your answer is "Iran is the threat", then check the "Kool Aid you've been drinking because it's full of the propaganda swill coming out of the Obama administration, the defense industry paid talking head generals, the right wing nuts in the Congress, AIPAC and the Israeli government along with MSM rags such as the Washington Post.
It's just amazing the amount of hubris emanating from the aforementioned crowd that somehow the U.S. is threatened by Iran expanding its defensive posture in the Persian Gulf.
Remember, it wasn't Iran placing two aircraft carrier groups sent to patrol the Iranian coast near the Strait of Hormuz as if the Persian Gulf were some American training lake to conduct maneuvers. This was and is a threatening armada, not cruise ships leisurely sailing as if they were in the Caribbean.
Can any American imagine even one Iranian warship peacefully sailing into Havana harbor for R and R just ninety miles off the Florida coast? That would be reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union in 1962. It ain't gonna happen!
But in light of the provocations by the U.S. what was Iran supposed to do? Cower in fear as the bully menaced it? No. It did what any country would do to protect itself. It expanded its" fleet of fast attack boats and submarines with high speed torpedoes, deployed conventional ballistic missiles as well as anti-ship "Silkworm" missiles" . .
This writer will not expound on the "perceived U.S. threats" by the Iranian's, so dutifully steno graphed in the Post article i.e." U.S. vulnerabilities", Iran's use of "swarm" tactics, "repeated threats to shut down shipping", retaliation for economic sanctions, Iran's ability to "execute a massive naval ambush", Iranian "military drills", the U.S. is "behind, but we're catching up", blah, blah, blah.
From here, the Post is and has been a propaganda organ for the government ever since its editorial page and the publisher chose to defend the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has never recanted that support even when it's been proven Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein was never in league with Osama bin Laden or had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, the phony pretexts for initiating that wrongful war.
What is the difference between an official government mouthpiece organ spouting propaganda and the drivel coming from the Post, formerly a great newspaper that exposed the "Watergate" scandal.
Jefferson said, "An informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny of the government". The Post and the rest of the MSM have become propaganda organs of the government, ceding away the press' natural skepticism and doing any real investigative journalism. They hide behind their obsession with objectivity and have become useful tools to propagate official government lies and leaks without fact checking the veracity of what the "officials" are feeding them.
That's not keeping the citizenry properly informed as they're forfeiting their 1st amendment granted Constitutional right as a free press to help protect the people against tyranny of the government.
