by Joseph Palermo, published on Socialist Action, October 8, 2024
Reprinted from The LA Progressive
[Editor’s note, Jeff Mackler: We reprint below Joseph Polermo’s Los Angeles Progressive factual account obliterating NYT’s rightwing editorialist Bret Stephen’s call for a punishing US war against Iran for its recent retaliatory firing of missiles on the genocidal Zionist Israeli entity. Polermo more than adequately sketches the US-Zionist horrors perpetrated on the Palestinian people and its allies in the region over the past 42 years, that is, since 1982. Here we add a few more details of US-Iran relations beginning with the 1953 US CIA coup that removed the elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. This was accompanied with the installation of the US-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi dictatorship for 16 years until the Shah was overthrown by one of the most powerful revolutions in history in 1979. That revolution saw an historic mobilization of 7 million Iranians in Teheran reduce the world’s fifth largest army – backed by the US and its CIA-trained death squad secret police, the Iranian Savak – to nothing in a mater of days. With 70,000 political prisoners, the Shah’s dictatorship ranked first in the world in blatant repression and torture. In retaliation for the 1979 Revolution, which transferred Iranian fossil fuel ownership and production from US and UK corporations to the Iranian government, the US-orchestrated the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, using its then US-armed and financed ally Saddam Hussein as its proxy. That war witnessed the slaughter of one million Iranians and 800,000 Iraqis. The infamous Congressional US Iran-Contra [Contragate] Hearings revealed that President Ronald Reagan’s US National Security official Oliver North secretly funded its arch enemy Iran during that war to make sure that both sides’ fossil fuel reserves were continuously destroyed to keep them off world markets to the advantage of the US corporate fossil fuel and banking monopolies. North also used the funds gained by secretly selling TOW missiles to Iran to illegally fund the US-backed Contra War against the Sandinista government. North also facilitated collaboration with the Columbian Medellin Drug Cartel to bring crack cocaine into Los Angeles where it was sold to raise funds for the US-backed Nicaraguan Contras! Funding the counterrevolutionary Contras had been banned by the Boland Amendment to a House Appropriations bill. The US followed its Middle East imperialist genocide with two devastating wars against Iraq, the last in the name of destroying its non-existent, according the UN, “weapons of mass destruction.” We leave out of this summary, the US wars that subsequently destroyed Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and now its proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. No doubt B.S. would have been an avid partisan of all of them, along with his NYT “All the news that’s fit to print,” except the truth, warmongering cohorts, “liberals” and “conservatives” alike!]
NYT’s Bret Stephens Says the U.S. Must Attack Iran
“B.S.” serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it, your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun.
High upon his perch atop the New York Times editorial page, Bret Stephens [photo above] offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran. This featured opinion piece in the “paper of record” is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that’s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.
Bret Stephens, to whom I will henceforward refer to as “B.S.,” serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it, your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun. He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound “bunker buster” bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut. He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah’s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to “kill all Jews.” B.S. knows how to get a rise out of his readers.
By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an “antisemite,” he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah’s existence in the first place. There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years. The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians. Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon, on August 31, 1960. He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn’t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank. In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, “The Party of God.”
Glaring Omission Number One:
De-historicizing and de-contextualizing the origins and objectives of Hezbollah.
Next, B.S. asks the rhetorical question: What if those missiles Iran fired at Israel on October 1st had been “nuclear tipped?” This hypothetical scenario indeed would be very scary. But scarier still might be Israel’s response since it’s well known that the IDF has at least 90 nuclear bombs at its disposal. (And B.S. knows this). Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires United Nations experts regularly to inspect and monitor its nuclear facilities. Also, Iran was abiding by the requirements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the most exhaustive nuclear non-proliferation agreement of its kind. It took the Obama Administration two years to negotiate the 2015 agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that he and the Israeli government bitterly opposed the deal.
The JCPOA stood until 2018, when President Donald J. Trump unceremoniously yanked the United States out of the deal over the vociferous objections of France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union, and the United Nations—countries that were all signatories to the multilateral contract.
Glaring Omission Number Two:
Israel is the only nuclear armed nation in the region.
Slogging onward, B.S. then raises the dubious claim made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon “within a week or two.” First, if this were true, it would sure make B.S.’s call for a huge U.S. bombing assault on Iran even more reckless and stupid. It’s also intellectually dishonest because it creates a “ticking time bomb” scenario where kinetic military action must be taken now, or else. “Now is the time to do something,” B.S. howls. This cliche is standard warmongering like we heard in the run-up to the Iraq War. The implication here is that the U.S. has been doing “nothing” and now must do “something.”
Yet the U.S. is already doing a lot of “somethings.” The U.S. has slapped on Iran the most severe and longest-standing economic sanctions in history. The U.S. has worked hand-in-glove with Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities through aggressive and sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as “Stuxnet” and others. The U.S. has assisted, enabled, and cheered on Israel’s multiple assassinations of Iranian scientists, including their top physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was gunned down with an A.I.-automated robot machine gun in Absard, Iran, on November 27, 2020. And on January 3, 2020, the United States unilaterally assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, Qasem Soleimani, outside the Baghdad airport in a drone attack that burned him alive and turned the car he was in into a pile of molten metal.
Maybe these flamboyant U.S.-Israeli actions targeting Iran in recent years don’t constitute doing “something” in B.S.’s mind, but to the United Nations Security Council (where Iran has brought many formal complaints against the U.S. and Israel) they appear to count as “something.”
Glaring Omission Number Three:
Pretending the U.S. and Israel have never done anything untoward to Iran.
B.S. declares the current status quo with Iran is “utterly intolerable,” and that Iran is a threat “to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead.”
This statement is astonishingly myopic coming after a year of U.S.-facilitated atrocities and genocide in Gaza, which contravene the U.N. Charter, multiple U.N. resolutions, the Geneva Conventions, and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), the latter of which has indicted Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Where is this “liberal international order” that “we are supposed to lead,” to which B.S. is referring? And who is responsible for tearing it up?