Jacob G. Hornberger – August 16, 2018
I am getting that Iraq deja vu feeling again, only this time with respect to Iran.
You’ll recall the build-up to the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq: WMDs. Mushroom clouds. Charts and graphs. Preventive war.
The anti-Iraq propaganda from U.S. officials was overwhelming, so much so that by the time U.S. officials initiated their war of aggression against Iraq, many Americans had completely accepted the notion that the United States was an innocent victim about to come under nuclear attack from Saddam Hussein and that the U.S. government needed to initiate a massive military attack and invasion of Iraq in order to defend the United States.
Of course, as everyone learned afterward, the propaganda was entirely bogus. There were no WMDs and even if there were, the last thing that Iraq was going to do with them was start a war against the most powerful military in history. The entire propaganda build-up was designed to get the American people on board with a war of aggression and not ask too many questions.
President Trump just issued one of his infamous midnight tweets, this one telling Iranian officials (with caps in the original):
“NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
Trump was responding to a speech on Sunday [July 22] delivered by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani urging President Trump to “make peace” with Iran.
What was the so-called threat to which Trump was referring? In his speech, Rouhani stated, “America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.”
That’s the “threat” to which Trump was referring. It’s just another bogus propagandistic excuse to find a way to start another war of aggression against a country that has never attacked the United States or threatened to do so, contrary to what Trump alleges in his midnight tweet.
The fact is that the last thing that Iran wants is a war with the United States. Like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other nations that the U.S. deep state has attacked, Iran is a second-rate nation, one whose military would not stand a chance against the U.S. military in a war. Everyone knows that in a U.S. war of aggression against Iran, the U.S. military will wreak massive death and destruction in Iran, especially against the Iranian populace, just like it did in Iraq.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo just delivered a speech to an audience of Iranian-Americans in California that appears to be softening the ground for a war against Iran. Comparing the Iranian government to the Mafia, Pompeo labeled Iran’s leading clerics as “hypocritical holy men” who were running a regime that isn’t “normal.”
Of course, never mind that a regime that engages in formal policies of assassination, torture, indefinite detention, coups, and wars of aggression isn’t exactly “normal” either.
In his speech Pompeo emphasized that the U.S. government was on the side of the Iranian people. As one audience member pointed out, however, that sentiment is difficult to reconcile with the U.S. government’s brutal system of sanctions, which have brought tremendous misery, impoverishment, and even death to the Iranian people.
For more than 10 years, the U.S. deep state also enforced a brutal system of sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. The purpose of the sanctions was regime change, one by which the Iraqi regime would agree to comply with orders of the U.S. deep state or abdicate in favor of a regime that would follow such orders.
After more than ten years of sanctions, misery, and death among the Iraqi people, it was clear that they were not going to achieve the goal of regime change any time soon. That’s when U.S. officials decided to use the fear generated by the 9/11 attacks, along with the fear generated by the bogus WMDs, to garner support for a regime-change invasion of Iraq.
The U.S. sanctions against Iran are obviously encountering the same difficulty. Despite the suffering, impoverishment, and death the sanctions have produced — and continue to produce — among the Iranian people, there is no indication that they are going to produce regime change any time soon.
Trump and the deep state are obviously getting frustrated and impatient with the failure of their sanctions to achieve regime change in Iran, just as George W. Bush and the deep state became frustrated with the failure of their sanctions to achieve regime change in Iraq. Thus, no one should be surprised if Iran becomes another Iraq.
This article was originally published at FFF.org. Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
