2/28/2018 by Naomi Karavani
A organization called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) has come forward to say that the U.S’s push for war with Iran is based on false allegations. For the VIPS, this is somewhat of a déjà vu, as it was founded when the collection of Intel vets approached the Bush administration six weeks before “Operation Iraqi Freedom” with a similar warning. Its memorandum to the Bush administration in 2003 reads like a 21st century Nostradamus prediction. The group expressed distress at the “politicization of intelligence,” and correctly predicted instability and intensification of terrorist activity as a result of invading Iraq. Now, they’re warning the situation will worsen with a U.S. attack on Iran.
On top of that George W. Bush was also considering attacking Iran in 2007. But then backed off when a National Intelligence Estimate debunked the “conventional wisdom” that Iran was on the verge of a nuclear weapon. …So we’ve been in this position before.
In December, UN ambassador Nikki Haley claimed Iran violated the JCPOA (“Iran Nuclear Deal”) without producing evidence to back up the claim.
Yet she told the Security Council the administration had “undeniable evidence” Iran was promoting terrorism by supplying weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen, and displayed a Qiam short-range ballistic missile of dubious origins in the room. “When you look at this missile, this is terrifying, this is absolutely terrifying,” she said. “Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin.”
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Yet this weapon is “not capable of delivering warheads,” according to analyst Jeffrey Lewis, and Haley seemed to have nothing to say about Saudi Arabia’s many violations of international law, despite its indiscriminate bombing, egregious civilian casualties, and a blockade that manufactured a horrific ongoing famine in Yemen, the poorest nation in the Middle East.
The VIPS said in their memo, “One of the recurring big bipartisan lies being pushed on the public with the enthusiastic help of a largely pliant media is that Iran is the prime sponsor of terrorism in the world today.”
Many have said the Iran Nuclear Deal was too soft on a ‘regime’ with aggressive aims in the region. One critique is that the deal is not unlike the “appeasement” of Hitler by the allied powers, a characterization that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu loves to repeat. But the idea that military action is the only way of dealing with other countries is immature and is exactly the type of context-free understanding that lead us to the war in Vietnam and endless wars in the Middle East. …But of course many have argued “getting it wrong” is still good for the United States because it creates endless instability in the region, allowing the U.S. empire to remain in control.
Overall, Iran as an imminent threat to the U.S. is grossly over-exaggerated. While the country is indeed one of many powers in the Middle East, its rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel aim to portray any Iranian power as the return of the Persian Empire, even though the Persians have only very loose Shiite alliances. According to the VIPS, Iran is not “the world’s top sponsor of terrorism nor an imminent threat to US interests, and hostility towards the country offers more risk than reward.”
Iran has been a target of belligerent U.S. foreign policy since its 1979 revolution, which saw the removal of U.S. puppet Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The U.S is trying to regain control of the country under the guise of humanitarianism and democracy promotion. As the ancient proverb goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twenty-five times and kill millions via proxy wars…shame on us all.”
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