Iran's
Dire Threat
It might be able
to defend itself
By
Edward S. Herman
Z Magazine - October 2004:
Iran is the next U.S. and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media
are once again serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran’s alleged
menace and refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be
pure Orwell—that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and
its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the
possibility of self-defense.
You might have thought that after the retrospectively
awkward and embarrassing media service to Bush’s lies about Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction and dire threat to U.S. national security,
which greased the skids to the invasion/occupation of Iraq, that the
media would be less prone to jump uncritically on war propaganda
bandwagons. But you would be wrong. It is a pretty reliable law of
media performance that whenever the state targets an enemy, the media
will get on the bandwagon enthusiastically or, at minimum, allow
themselves to be mobilized as agents of propaganda and disinformation.
Given the power of the United States and the extreme weakness of its
usual targets, the claims of the fearsome threat posed by the targets
is always comical. My favorite remains Guatemala in the early 1950s,
when the National Security Council claimed that this poor, tiny, and
effectively disarmed country was “increasingly [an] instrument of
Soviet aggression in this hemisphere” and was posing a security threat
to the United States as well as its neighbors. As in the case of Iraq
in 2002-2003, most of the neighbors failed to recognize the dire threat
and had to be bribed and coerced into supporting the U.S. position and
the UN had to be (and was) neutralized.
In fact, the Communists hadn’t taken over Guatemala and,
with U.S. direct and indirect assistance, it was invaded and occupied
by a U.S.-organized band of expatriates and mercenaries a month after
the dire claims by the NSC. The New York Times and mass media
in general cooperated fully in the propaganda campaign that made this
proxy aggression palatable to the public. This early “liberation”
transformed a democracy into an authoritarian counterinsurgency and
terror state. The Times has never apologized for this
performance and it has carefully avoided analyzing the results of that
earlier intervention and contrasting it with the government’s (and its
own) pre-invasion propaganda claims.
Several decades later, in the 1980s, Nicaragua provided a
partial rerun of the Guatemala experience, with an alleged dire
security threat based on a link of the leftist Sandinistas to Moscow, a
link mainly forced by an arms boycott and open U.S. campaign of
destabilization, subversion, and sponsored terrorism. There was once
again an army of expatriates organized and funded by the U.S.—the
contras—that engaged in systematic terrorism. Once again the neighbors
of Nicaragua couldn’t see the dire threat and spent a great deal of
effort in trying to fend off the United States by mediation and
proposed compromises, which the Reagan administration resented and
shunted aside. Once again, an appeal to the UN for protection against
intervention by violence was futile and an International Court finding
against the United States was ignored. In this case, the United States
was able to oust the Sandinistas by the combination of terrorism and
boycott, which halved per capita incomes, and by the effective
manipulation of an election, in which the United States intervened with
advice, money, propaganda, and a blackmail threat—only if the
Sandinistas were ousted would the boycott and sponsored terrorism be
terminated. The combination worked and the Sandinistas were ousted.
The mainstream media carefully avoided the Guatemala context
as they once again served as agents of state propaganda, demonizing the
Sandinistas, failing to contest the stream of lies justifying the
violent intervention, ignoring its gross illegality, declaring the 1984
Nicaraguan election a “sham” (New York Times), whereas the
genuine sham elections held in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984 under
conditions of severe state terror were declared promising steps toward
democracy (see Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent; note
also how the U.S. media is now finding the U.S.-appointed puppet
government of Iraq a democratic breakthrough: “Early Steps, Maybe,
Toward a Democracy in Iraq,” NYT, July 27, 2004). When the
terror war, blackmail, and other forms of electoral intervention
successfully removed the Sandinistas, the media were ecstatic, the New
York Times featuring David Shipler’s ode to “Victory Through Fair
Play.”
So just as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iraq were dire threats,
so is Iran today because the Bush government says so and is supported
here by Ariel Sharon. The first rule in supportive propaganda is to
intensify attention to the villain and the alleged threat that he
poses. Thus, the claims that Iran is trying to become a nuclear power
have become the continuous basis of news, with all the details and
claims of its moves toward nuclear capability newsworthy, emanating as
they are from a superpower that is a primary-definer-plus. When it
barks, all the smaller doggies in the “international community,”
including Kofi Annan and relevant UN agency officials (in this case,
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency [IAEA]), join in with their complementary barks.
Nevertheless, Dr. ElBaradei has been uncomfortable in his role of UN
agency frontperson for the U.S. buildup toward an attack on Iran, his
role being similar to that of Hans Blix in the preparation for the Iraq
attack. In a recent interview with Al-Ahram News (July 27, 2004), he
notes how confined he is by his limited powers, so that he cannot visit
Israel’s Dimon reactor, only Iran’s facilities, although he believes
the only real solution is denuclearization throughout the Middle East
(www.iaea.org).
The analogy with the attention to Iraq’s alleged
possession and threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2001-2003 is
close: the United States made those claims, pressed them on the UN and
its allies, and in consequence this became first order news. Today, the
United States makes charges against Iran, presses its allies and the
IAEA, and this makes the issue newsworthy. As a crude index, during the
last six months (February 27-August 27, 2004), the New York Times
had 21 articles whose headlines indicated that their subject matter was
Iran’s threat to acquire nuclear capability, with dozens more
mentioning the Iran-nuclear connection.
The second rule in supportive propaganda is to frame the
issues in such a way that the premises of the propaganda source are
taken as given, with any inconvenient considerations ignored and any
sources that would contest the party line bypassed or marginalized.
This technique is well illustrated in David Sanger’s “Diplomacy Fails
to Slow Advance of Nuclear Arms,” the front-page feature article in the
New York Times of August 8, 2004—a virtually
perfect model of propaganda service.
The frame of Sanger’s article is the threat of the
nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the efforts to contain that
threat via diplomacy, the difficulties encountered in these efforts,
U.S. and Israeli concerns over the matter, and the opinions of Western
officials and experts over what should be done. All seven quoted
sources in Sanger’s piece are present or former U.S. officials, which
allows the establishment frame to be presented without challenge.
A basic Sanger premise is that the United States and Israel
are good and do not pose threats worthy of mention, so that any
“advance” in nuclear arms, or the possession and threat of use of such
weapons by these states, is outside the realm of discourse. Thus, the
ongoing and well-funded U.S. program of developing “blockbuster” and
other tactical nuclear weapons, the Bush plan to make nuclear weapons
not merely a deterrent, but usable in normal warfare, and the U.S.
intention to exploit space as a platform for nuclear as well as other
technologically advanced weapons systems, do not fall under the heading
“advance of nuclear arms” and they are not mentioned in the article.
These are not the views of the global majority, but they represent the
official U.S. view, hence serving as a premise of the Times reporter.
A second and related Sanger premise is that the United
States has the right to decide who can and cannot have nuclear arms and
to compel the disarmament of any country that acquires them. He quotes
Bush’s statement that he will not “tolerate” North Korea or Iran
acquiring such arms, and Sanger treats the U.S. push to keep its
targets disarmed as an undebatable position.
A third premise is that while Iran’s possible violation of
its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty is newsworthy and
important, the failure of the United States to follow through on its
promise in signing that treaty to work toward the elimination of
nuclear weapons through good faith negotiations, a commitment brazenly
violated in the open Bush effort to improve and make usable nuclear
weapons, is not newsworthy. Again, this is what a press arm of the
government would take as a premise, and so does the New York Times
(and virtually the entire corporate media).
A fourth premise of Sanger’s piece is that Israel’s refusal
to have anything to do with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its
possession and threat to use nuclear arms is not relevant as context in
discussing the threat of Iran’s nuclear capability. Israel is referred
to by Sanger only as fearing the Iran threat and possibly planning on
preemptive action to eliminate that threat. The Arab states and most of
the world cannot see the justice of Israel being allowed to acquire
nuclear arms, even with superior conventional forces and a U.S.
protective umbrella, while Arab states cannot do so. Again, as Israel
is a U.S. client state whose acquisition of nuclear arms was
facilitated and is protected by the United States, this matter is
outside the orbit of discourse for U.S. officials and hence of the New
York Times (etc.).
A fifth premise, implicit in the foregoing, is that Iran
does not have a right to self-defense. Israel claims that its nuclear
weapons are for self-defense in a hostile environment, but Iran,
threatened by both Israel and its superpower ally, does not have that
right, although its self-defense needs are far more serious than either
Israel’s or the U.S.’s. This was a premise of officials, and hence of
the New York Times, in dealing with Guatemala’s attempt to buy
arms back in 1953, Nicaragua’s similar efforts in the 1980s, and
Saddam’s mythical threatening WMD in 2002-3.
Sanger’s article is clean in the sense that there is no
deviation from the party line on the source of any nuclear threat and
the “advances” that are worrisome. The Times’ subservience to
the state in the propaganda buildup to the invasion-occupation of Iraq
was not new and was not terminated by that sad experience. On the
contrary, it proceeds apace, with any lessons or qualms overpowered by
institutional forces that press it to support state crimes now just as
it did in the case of the overthrow of democracy in Guatemala in 1954
and other alleged “liberations.”
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