With
seemingly each passing day, the tensions between the US and Iran over
the latter’s nascent nuclear program mount. And with the voices
clamoring for conflict growing ever louder, the clouds of war darken.
As Mark Helprin warns in a January 18
Wall Street Journal op-ed,
the Iranian nuclear program poses “a mortal threat” to the US. As he
explains, “we cannot dismiss the possibility of Iranian nuclear charges
of 500 pounds or less ending up in Manhattan or Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt, meanwhile, argue in a January 17
Foreign Affairs piece
for outright regime change. As they state: “After all, Iran’s nuclear
program is a symptom of a larger illness—the revolutionary
fundamentalist regime in Tehran.” (An anonymous US official was quoted
in the
Washington Post on January 10 to hold regime change aspirations as well, before the paper later
"clarified" the official’s remarks.)
Such frenzied and war hungry rhetoric,
however, has not been limited to the standard purveyors of
neoconservative drivel. In fact, dramatically escalating the tensions
and sense of fear amongst the American public has been the nation’s
mainstream press corps, which has readily abandoned any and all
pretensions of journalistic integrity in the service of propaganda.
Indicative of this is the fact that it
is now a common occurrence to have dire warnings of an Iranian nuclear
weapons program splashed across the pages of the nation’s preeminent
newspapers. This endless chorus, though, comes despite the fact that an
Iranian nuclear
weapons program—as does its purported desire to
even develop such a program—currently exists only in one’s imagination.
This much we know from the
latest US National Intelligence Estimate.
Nonetheless, the sheer and utter
invention of an Iranian nuclear weapons program has increasingly come to
be held by the American press as fact. For as Joseph Goebbels would
have it: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people
will eventually come to believe it.”
Illustrative of this dark axiom at work, we read in a January 12
Los Angeles Times editorial that: “
Iran’s development of nuclear weapons [emphasis
added] poses a grave threat to world stability and possibly an
existential threat to this country’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel.” In a
January 10
Washington Post editorial we read that, “Iran may be feeling some economic pain, and it may be isolated.
But its drive for nuclear weapons continues [emphasis added].” And in a January 4
New York Times
piece we learn that, “The threats from Iran, aimed both at the West and
at Israel, combined with a recent assessment by the International
Atomic Energy Agency
that Iran's nuclear program has a military objective [emphasis added], is becoming an important issue in the American presidential campaign.”
Of course, the hysteria over a
hypothetical Iranian nuclear weapons program has by no means been
limited to US print media. The cable broadcast network CNN (i.e., “the
most trusted name in news”) has also reported the fictitious claim that
Iran's nuclear program has a military objective as fact.
Source: Corbett Report
Source: Global Research
Source: Council of the National Interest
Source: Activist Post
Source: Corbett Report
Source: Global Research
Source: The Hindu