If you think U.S.-led regime change in Iran is a good idea, the first thing I’d like you to consider is how much this operation would benefit the centers of power. Iran recently dropped the dollar, a move that goes against the agenda of the World Bank and that’s gotten other countries bombed when they’ve attempted it. And like in every war, this conflict would also be profitable for Washington’s defense contractors.
The next thing that Americans need to recognize is that our leaders are telling massive lies to us about Iran. It’s astonishing how blatant they are; the arguments that President Trump has made for pulling out of the Iran deal, for instance, have been so transparently false that the New York Times-which endorsed the Iraq War-has published articles deconstructing them. But the lack of consensus within the political and media establishment over whether to go to war with Iran comes from partisanship and differing interests among elites. The Trump/Bolton/Adelson faction is largely in command right now, and we need to defeat their propaganda efforts before they start this war.
Firstly, Trump’s case against the Iran deal was filled with major distortions of what’s happened between Iran and the U.S. in recent years. After Obama negotiated the Iran deal in 2015-one of the few antiwar actions Obama took throughout his presidency-Iran fulfilled its promise to not create weapons of mass destruction. Iran has given up the Uranium that it would need to build a nuclear weapon, as has been confirmed through inspections of Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and evidently hasn’t come any closer to bringing the program back. And the situation won’t change when parts of the deal expire in the coming years, since Iran was permanently prohibited under the deal from developing nuclear weapons. The Trump administration’s attempts to claim otherwise have depended on outright hoaxes; in December, Nikki Haley’s theatrical display of a supposed Iranian Uranium bomb was found by UN inspectors to have had “no evidence as to the identity of the broker or supplier;” and the White House was forced last month to retract its claim that Iran has a “nuclear weapons program.”
Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation this year which accused Iran of violating the deal was falsely based as well. Not only did it not provide any new information, but some parts of it were fabricated, such as the claim that Israel had acquired a secret collection of incriminating Iranian documents.
Then there are the more accessorial lies the Trump administration has told about Iran: the claim that the nuclear deal gave Iran millions of dollars undeservedly, despite all of the frozen assets having already belonged to Iran; Trump’s statement that Iran is the “top sponsor of terror,” despite this being completely untrue; there is no indication Iran plans to attack America’s allies without provocation, and many experts have expressed doubt that last month’s famous “Iranian attack” on Israel was actually done by Iran.
The claim that Iran shares responsibility for 9/11 is baseless, mainly because none of the terrorists involved were Iranians. And the charges of an Iranian partnership with Al Qaeda are similarly misleading. Many of these claims have been passed around by the mainstream media, with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies-a neocon, pro Israel think tank-privately providing the claims to the media.
The remaining argument that I’ve seen for war with Iran is that the country’s government is an Islamic theocracy that needs to be overthrown. Aside from this argument’s total disregard for international sovereignty laws, it shows the vast hypocrisy and arrogance of the neocon leaders who are trying to get us into this conflict.
Some estimates have put the Iraq War’s death count at around half a million. Almost 5,000 of the dead are U.S. soldiers, and 20 percent of the 1.5 million U.S. soldiers who’ve been to Iraq now have PTSD. One million American soldiers have been wounded in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars overall. And the Iraq invasion has allowed for the rise of ISIS-a group that the U.S. has directly aided in recent years-which has committed its own series of atrocities. Now John Bolton, who should have been tried as a war criminal for his role in Iraq, is leading the Trump administration into an Iran conflict that would be even more catastrophic than his last accomplishment.
For the Iran war’s manufacturers to portray their cause as a morality mission is an insult to the millions of people who are living with the horriffic effects of the recent wars that have been started under the same guise. We need to all we can to politically sink the efforts towards this war, dismantle the imperialist system, and hold the people behind past wars accountable.
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