Widespread media-enforced ignorance about Operation Ajax provoked Adbusters to famously call the U.S. “the United States of Amnesia.”
Elided from mainstream media coverage, the root cause of the current standoff with Iran is the 1953 U.S.-orchestrated overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected government and its Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. This led to decades of U.S.-backed oppression under the Shah’s brutal dictatorship. The U.S. could prevent a disastrous military engagement with Iran by following this simple plan:
– Fly a high ranking official – Sec. Clinton, at the least – to Tehran and deliver a full and public apology for the coup and subsequent oppression, perhaps along with reparations;
– Additionally, offer Iran normalized diplomatic relations, and as part of the package, both a non-aggression treaty and a broad agreement on a nuclear weapons free Middle East, to which the U.S. would pressure all states in the region – including Israel – to become signatories.
Iran would likely accept. That’s it. Sanity, right?
Unfortunately, the neoconservatives, the pro-Israel lobby, and Israel’s government are determined to a) maintain Israel’s covert nuclear weapons monopoly at all costs, and b) provoke yet another pre-emptive war of aggression. The consequences will at minimum be catastrophic and involve the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians, however, the worst case scenario could be a regional and/or nuclear war.
Attention U.S. occupiers: please, do the world a favor. #OCCUPYCONGRESS! Demand an apology to Iran for overthrowing their government, and normalized diplomatic relations!
>> The U.S. could prevent a disastrous military engagement with Iran by following this simple plan:
A clear and concise “better argument” that even a fraudulent “humanist” could approve of! (Or not.)
Hear! Hear!
This is so sensible I’m sure the authors will never be heard from again.
It also has the virtue of refocusing the Iran problem from Israel and onto the US, which is in a way an end-around the Lobby as it is not explicitly an anti-Israeli position. I know that many people who post here prefer to concentrate on the Israeli problem, and certainly the warmongering from Israel and its minions is currently at a fever pitch, but it’s wrong to overlook the fact that the US has had a hardon for Iran since the 1950s, and definitely since the hostage crisis, for which it has never forgiven Iran. In those Cold War days at least, not all evils perpetrated by the US were of Israeli origin.
There are things that are worth doing even if they are likely to fail of their avowed purposes. USA saying “sorry” to Iran is such a thing. (USA has many other countries to say “sorry” to, of course. Iraq and Palestine, for recent starters. Most of Central America. etc. ad naus.)
However, USA cannot offer a “broad agreement on nukes” because it cannot compel Israel, Pakistan, India to join such a treaty (I suppose these are in Iran’s “region” what with long-range missiles these days).
Better, IMO, is to back off all the anti-nuclear stuff. I don’t see the danger of a few nukes here and there if they are kept for national use and not given-to-or-stolen-by terrorists. (Can we say for sure that Israel’s nukes have not fallen into the hands of terrorists, such as the settler-groups in the IDF?)
That is a rational and intelligent plan and Iran would accept it even without an apology. But it’s never going to happen.
Why? Because of the Jewish state and it’s supporters in the US and it’s Lobby.
Pay attention to the “Restrictions on Contact” in the latest Iran sanctions bills passed by congress. Rosenberg, who ought to know, says this bill was written by AIPAC word for word and given to congress to pass as is.
Anyone who thinks WAR on Iran isn’t the END GAME of the Jewish state and it’s supporters in the US and it’s Lobby isn’t reading this right.
This has never before happened in the history of this country and is in fact unconstitutional.
So now the Jewish state and US zionist supporters have; first, driven the US from it’s own interest, second, driven it from all particpation in international law and third, now driven it from it’s own constitution.
If the Senate approves it…then the war train has left the station
‘Lobbying for a US war with Iran, AIPAC is pushing a bill that would prohibit diplomacy between the two nations.’
MJ Rosenberg
(excerpt)
The House Foreign Affairs Committee hurriedly convened this week to consider a new “crippling sanctions” bill that seems less designed to deter an Iranian nuclear weapon than to lay the groundwork for war.
The clearest evidence that war is the intention of the bill’s supporters comes in Section 601:
(c) RESTRICTION ON CONTACT – No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that –
(1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and
(2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organisations.
(d) WAIVER – The president may waive the requirements of subsection (c) if the president determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.
Preventing diplomacy
So what does this mean? It means that neither the president, the secretary of state, nor any US diplomat or emissary may engage in negotiations or diplomacy of any kind unless the president convinces the “appropriate congressional committees” (most significantly, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which is an AIPAC fiefdom) that not permitting the contacts would pose an “extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States”.
To call this unprecedented is an understatement. At no time in our history has the White House or State Department been restricted from dealing with representatives of a foreign state, even in wartime.
But preventing diplomacy is precisely what Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Howard Berman (D-CA), leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that set out this bill, seek. They and others who back the measure want another war and the best way to get it is to ban diplomacy (which exists, of course, to prevent war).
Think back, for example, to the Cuban missile crisis. The United States
Then, at the darkest moment of the crisis, when war seemed inevitable, an ABC correspondent named John Scali secretly met with a Soviet official in New York who described a way to end the crisis that would satisfy his bosses. That meeting was followed by another secret meeting between the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, and a Soviet official in Washington. Those meetings led to a plan that ended the crisis and, perhaps, saved the world.
Needless to say, Kennedy did not ask for the permission of the House Foreign Affairs Committee either to conduct secret negotiations or to implement the terms of the deal. In fact, it was decades before the details of the deal were revealed.
It is this latitude to conduct diplomacy that the lobby and its cutouts on Capitol Hill want to take away from the White House. And it’s latitude that is especially essential if it is determined that Iran is trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal.
Strategic engagement with an adversary can go hand in hand with a policy that encourages change in that country. That’s how Washington dealt with the Soviet Union and China in the 1970s and 1980s. Iran is a country of 80 million people, educated and dynamic. It sits astride a crucial part of the world. It cannot be sanctioned and pressed down forever. It is the last great civilisation to sit outside the global order. We need a strategy that combines pressure with a path to bring Iran in from the cold.’
Go here and listen to MJ being interviewed on this article and explain how AIPAC literally writes ALL the legistation on the ME and Israel:
http://antiwar.com/radio/2011/11/07/m-j-rosenberg-2/
Matthew Taylor wrote:
“Additionally, offer Iran normalized diplomatic relations, and as part of the package, both a non-aggression treaty and a broad agreement on a nuclear weapons free Middle East…”
I’m delighted that someone in all this “attack Iran” hysteria has put their finger through the bubble that is the present (mainstream) discourse and brought up the ultimate, complete answer to or at least explanation of reality, which is a Nuke-Free ME Accord.
Ought to be the first and the last thing out of the mouths of those opposing any attack upon Iran, or at least any American attack on Iran: Even if, for some reason, someone just accepts that the U.S. ought go doing Israel’s bidding to protect Israel, it’s just simply unanswerable:
Israel *isn’t* just simply and reasonably asking that it not be subject to nuclear attack, threats or blackmail by its neighbors. It’s asking that it be the *only* one in the ME to be able to use nukes to attack, threaten or blackmail its neighbors.
And this is an entirely different kettle of fish. Showing, no doubt, why the issue of a Nuke-Free ME Accord, or even just a mutual Israel/Iran Nuke-Free Accord is just never mentioned by anyone here in Western officialdom. When you can’t counter the undeniable, do everything in your power to make everyone else ignore and forget it…