Image by Nk Ni.
American propaganda, or what the corporate media call journalism, is a sight to behold. The word “sophisticated” is routinely applied by people who know the score. But that requires some explaining. After all, on its face, our propaganda is crude, shameless, regularly absurd—the opposite of sophisticated. And yet it’s remarkably effective. Hence, Washington’s ability to carry out all kinds of crimes in our names without meeting much, if any, domestic resistance.
The success of American propaganda lies not in its content but its omnipresence. I’ll spare you the apocryphal quotes from Hitler and Goebbels (who incidentally drew much inspiration from England’s wartime propaganda), but it seems axiomatic that if enough folks in positions of power and authority make the same assertions often enough, the majority of people will take them to be true.
Few Americans have the time or the inclination to vet what the government and media tell them, however silly it might sound. How could the State Department, Congress, CNN, NPR and the New York Times all be wrong? That would suggest a national conspiracy and we all know that anyone who talks of conspiracies is out of his tree. Once you build the framework for an effective propaganda machine—meaning one of which all the relevant parties serve as cogs—you can get away with saying just about anything. The machine is sophisticated even if the noise it makes is not.
As a general rule, the absurdity of a claim corresponds to how often the powers that be make it. In the documentary film The Act of Killing, about the mass murder of communists and others deemed undesirable by the Indonesian government, men who participated in the killings (they’re still free) repeatedly tell their followers that “gangster” means “honorable man” and that one should be flattered by the label. (Perhaps McNamara gave them that line to rehearse.) It was bizarre to the point of comedy, not unlike the Israeli refrain, aped by American pundits, that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.” One most frequently encounters this slogan during one of the IDF’s regular mass murder campaigns against the Palestinians or the Lebanese, most of whom, we’re told, either endorse or engage in acts of terrorism, justifying everything Israel does to them. Needless to say, if the IDF were actually the most moral army in the world, Israel would have no cause to remind us. We don’t hear Swiss leaders incessantly declaring theirs “the most neutral army in the world.”
Washington’s favorite anti-Iran mantra, namely, that Iran is “the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism,” is as ridiculous as the foregoing examples. The fact that government officials and self-styled journalists continue to serve it up illustrates how obtuse they think we are. We are expected to forget, for example, that the United States gave material support to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, out of which grew the organization we spent two decades—and trillions of dollars—fighting in a war of utter futility. In Bosnia we supported them again in their jihad against the Serbs and Croats. Lurking in the shadows of all this action was Saudi national Osama bin Laden, alleged mastermind of 9/11. Of the nineteen hijackers on that fateful day, fifteen hailed from Saudi Arabia (two fought in Bosnia). A total of zero came from Iran. The Iranian government is a natural born enemy of al-Qaeda and all other Wahhabi gangs, including the new junta in Damascus. (It was almost surreal to see photos of Abu Mohammad al-Julan, the former al-Qaeda chieftain who now claims to be president of Syria, glad-handing with US officials in the White House—you really cannot, to coin a phrase, make this stuff up.)
Those basic facts alone would appear to indicate that Saudi Arabia and the US, not Iran, are the greatest state sponsors of terrorism. And that’s speaking only of the Islamic variety. Terrorism launched out of Washington and other Western capitals (e.g. drone assassinations and out-and-out invasions) is another story altogether, one not suitable for public discourse or polite conversation.
The Iranian Black Legend, as you know, dates back to 1979, when they had the nerve to overthrow the despot we treated them to following our overthrow of their first democratically elected leader in 1953. Our support for Saddam’s bloodthirsty war on their country throughout the ’80s didn’t help matters. Nor did the US Navy’s takedown of an Iranian passenger jet in 1988, whereby 290 people were killed. But it wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Cold War that Iran became a constant target of US propaganda, much of it egged on by Israel.
Our “special relationship” with Israel, that great exemplar of peace and democracy, took shape after the Israelis proved their imperial mettle in 1967, at which point we recognized their usefulness as a bulwark against the godless Soviet Union’s influence in the region. From that point forward Israel enjoyed the perks of having the world’s superpower as a patron: free military aid, diplomatic immunity and access to US lawmakers, to name a few. They were also allowed to build an undeclared nuclear weapons system without consequences.
Over time the Israel lobby developed and gained clout. It was this now-notorious lobby that worked overtime behind the scenes to ensure that the special relationship continued uninterrupted into the post-Cold War era. For this to happen Israel needed Washington to identify a new nemesis or, better yet, several. (We needed this, too, lest our bloated “defense” budget be scrutinized.) Iran and Iraq, both attempting to regroup after their war, were good candidates. The latter made our job easy by attacking Kuwait, but we had to get creative with Iran. We settled on the “rogue state with nuclear ambitions” motif, and suddenly Israel’s fate was bound up with Washington’s.
The tail began to wag the dog: if Iran posed an “existential threat” to Israel, it was somehow up to the US to eliminate that threat. It’s a concept that steadily gained traction, though no one ever took the time to explain why Israel’s row with Iran should be of any concern to the American public. Nor is it explained why Israel deserves $4 billion from the American treasury every year while, as Bernie Sanders keeps reminding us, half a million Americans are sleeping on the streets.
Of course, Iran’s real crime is refusing to go along with US and Israeli designs on the region. Iran frustrates our efforts to exercise absolute control over Mideast oil and challenges Israel’s colonial project by, among other things, supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. It also fought our terrorist proxies in Syria. Israel has dropped plenty of bombs on Syria in recent years, not one of which targeted al-Qaeda or ISIS. As for us, we stood by while ISIS bit off chunks of Syrian territory and watched as their trucks transported stolen Syrian oil to the border with Turkey. We did nothing as they planted their black flag in Palmyra—twice. ISIS was barely mentioned in Western media—Obama famously described them as a “JV” version of al-Qaeda—until they began cutting off the heads of American journalists on camera. Our chief objective was to deep-six Assad and replace his government with … well, another Taliban. It took some time, and a lot of body bags, but we finally got what we wanted. Speaking of priorities, it was reported just after Qasem Soleimani’s assassination in 2020 (the first of Trump’s major acts of aggression against Iran) that Washington had put its anti-ISIS campaign on the shelf as it prepped for a showdown with Iran and Shia militias in Iraq. Few in the media seemed perturbed.
Some prefer to downplay the extent to which our hawkishness toward Iran is on Israel’s behalf. Economist Michael Hudson argues, as did Noam Chomsky, that the US is motivated exclusively by a desire to maintain control of the region’s oil and shore up the petrodollar. In The Israel Lobby, a book that is now enjoying a sort of renaissance, Mearsheimer and Walt take the opposite position. They point to the lobby’s success in persuading Congress to pass bills with a view to isolating Iran’s economy. And they give an example of a time when the oil industry’s interests were subordinated to Israel’s: in 1995, Clinton put the kibosh on a deal that would have allowed an American company, Conoco, to develop oil fields in Iran. “In this case,” they write, “an American oil company wanted to deal with Iran, and Iran wanted to do business with it. The oil industry was opposed to overturning the Conoco deal, and it also opposed the legislation to impose sanctions on Iran. … But oil interests were steamrolled by AIPAC on every decision.”
The hostility to Iran and Iraq grew more hysterical in the wake of 9/11, with Baby Bush unveiling his famous Axis of Evil: Iraq, Iran and … North Korea. It was a nonsensical formulation. As Gore Vidal said at the time, “he doesn’t know what an axis is.” In due course, both Iraq and Iran were falsely accused of having had a hand in the attacks (Iran still is). Then we hit our old friend Saddam, and Iran became The World’s Greatest State Sponsor of Terrorism. How did the mullahs earn this grandiose sobriquet? By supporting insurgents in Iraq who, yes, fought and killed occupying American soldiers. Terrible for friends and family of the fallen, who should not have been there in the first place, but logical from the Iranian point of view. We had just invaded their neighbor and explicitly identified them as our next victim. It would have been suicidal for Iran not to have taken steps to protect its interests and security given the circumstances. But we Americans aren’t particularly good at putting ourselves in other people’s shoes. It must be a defense mechanism: if we viewed our actions from the other side, our self-image would explode.
It’s true, as others have stressed, that the current moment was many years in the making. With one eye to oil and the other to Israel, the jingos in both parties carefully paved the way for war. But no other president would be impulsive and maniacal enough to do what Trump did on February 28th. Obama had ample opportunity to escalate the conflict with Iran and, unlike Trump, would likely have met with bipartisan support. Instead he opted for—gasp—engagement and diplomacy. The nuclear pact was signed and a detente between Washington and Tehran, inconceivable during the Bush years, looked to be on the horizon. For this Obama should be applauded. After all, there’s no rational case for war with Iran. Trump, though, is nothing if not irrational, and so he made it one of his first orders of business to sabotage the nuclear deal, despite Iran’s perfect compliance with its terms.
Trump’s hostility to the JCPOA stems from his despite for Obama and his affinity for Israel. The affinity is mutual. Trump is extraordinarily popular in Israel: they named a settlement in the Golan Heights after him. He and Netanyahu are peas in a pod: both prolific liars and criminals, both perpetually embroiled in domestic political scandals. Like Trump, Netanyahu hates Obama, for reasons that are likely due more to racism than anything else. It’s not as though Obama spoke against the occupation or settlements, or had anything remotely negative to say about the IDF’s assault on Gaza in 2014. Quite the reverse: Obama duly defended Israel’s war crimes and vetoed a 2011 Security Council resolution condemning its illegal settlement activity. His decision, just before leaving office, to allow an identical resolution to pass was a personal jab at his Israeli counterpart, nothing more.
Negotiating the JCPOA was an act of sanity and self-preservation, a rejection of the mad neoconservative plot to march us into another bloody misadventure in the Middle East. As a result, Obama was relentlessly attacked by the corporate Zionist mob known formally as the Republican Party—the same mob that has celebrated all of Trump’s anti-Iran shenanigans which have finally, after years of reckless provocation, culminated in a crazy and disastrous war from which there appears to be no escape.
Blame Trump for pulling the trigger, but blame the Media, State Department, Congress, and every other element of the American political establishment for handing him the loaded gun.
