By Ramin Mazaheri and cross posted with PressTV
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism.’
Back in 2003 the words “quagmire” and “end game” were on everyone’s lips – 17 years later the world has been forcefully reminded that the Western war on Iraq has still not ended.
The globally condemned assassination of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani is not part of a “new” war on Iran – it is crucial history in the “old” war on Iraq.
However, fomenting “new war” hysteria with Iran permits the United States to avoid reckoning with the Iraqi proofs of their illegal negligence, hypocrisy and brutality. Looking for a new war with Iran is essentially the lamentable historical continuation of Washington’s multi-century policy of, “On to the next tribe of Indian nomads”.
But it goes even deeper than that:
No American would deny that the Vietnam War changed the very nature of American democracy. Certainly, the slaying of Soleimani is the most shocking military action in many years, and thus it fundamentally alters and magnifies how the Iraq War is changing the very nature of American democracy, still.
If World War II was a sober affair, with many Americans genuinely believing in the war’s ideals of anti-fascism, Vietnam certainly was not. The widespread rejection of this fanatically ideological war – the “domino theory” of the spreading of “sinister” socialism – ultimately only produced a “pop cultural revolution”. There was no civic and political revolution because there was no reform of institutions which had proven to lack a democratic mandate.
However, if Vietnam resulted in the average American’s open and persistent refusal to believe their government – which was an important historical first for the US – the Iraq War will prove to have been when the average American retained this same correct skepticism but became unable to publicly admit their disbelief.
The Iraq War ushered in a new culture of lying for America, where Americans knew they were peddling total falsehoods, and knew that their listeners knew their claims were falsehoods, but there was a collective agreement to keep spreading these falsehoods anyway.
This is how we get to the point where somebody like Soleimani – who had bravely and unequivocally been an anti-terrorist hero – is publicly accused of being a “terrorist” by American leadership.
Because Washington’s goals are so imperialist, so rabidly capitalist and so fueled by feudal realpolitik, instead of acknowledging how Soleimani’s leading of the fight against ISIL saved many innocent European and American lives (and even the lives of the mercenary “contractors” from these nations), US Vice-President Mike Pence now absurdly says Soleimani was a part of 9/11. Trump says he is justified to plan bombings of “cultural sites”, even though everyone knows he means mosques. Secretary of State Pompeo says the mob hit was “protecting American interests”, even though the only Americans truly pleased are also Israeli Zionists.
In the Vietnam era Americans said en masse that they don’t believe nonsense like this, but the Iraq War has changed American democracy – now many Americans feel compelled to say they believe it… but they actually don’t.
To believe that Americans truly believe the endless lies of their post-2003 governments is to assume that Americans are either deluded or mentally disabled, and neither are true: Americans know they are poorly governed but now feel powerless to resist the injustice of their own leaders.
Therefore, just as they were marched to war in 2003 even though it was clearly based on the lie of WMDs, the Pentagon and US Deep State are hoping they can start a war with Iran based on more preposterous lies, such as the murder of anti-terror hero Soleimani being justified because he was a “terrorist”.
They have a lot of help: Republicans, right-wing pundits and liberal “objective” American journalists all dutifully report the fantastic lies of the Bush II, Obama and Trump administrations as though they are – maybe – true. The US claims to have a free press but for 17 years they have rarely dared to question their leaders with the same rigour as in the era of Vietnam. However, all these people are paid with either money or power to say these things – please do not believe that the average American, 44% of whom qualify as low-wage workers, has any incentive to believe in or continue a system which punishes them ever-more mercilessly since the start of the Great Recession.
Such workers now have “few prospects of improving their lot” except by publicly playing along with the fictions of the US 1%. Thus the fundamental change to America democracy wrought by 17 years of Iraq War is that in order to “live the American dream” one must openly embrace a “false life”. This is a twist, and one which does not resort to vulgarity, of a new idea making the rounds across the Western mainstream media: their endemic socio-economic hopelessness has created widespread “s—-life syndrome”.
The Trump era is the apex (at least one hopes) of this “false life” reality of 21st century US society.
Trump himself is certainly not crazy but he is undoubtedly a liar. Pompeo himself openly revealed the sad degeneration of American dishonesty: “… when I was a cadet – what’s the cadet motto at West Point? (West Point is the number one military prep school in the US) ‘You will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.’ I was the CIA director – we lied, we cheated, we stole. That’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”
Bush I was a former CIA director, so it’s not as if Pompeo really represents a new development in US neo-fascism (it is “neo” because open US Apartheid is over), but my point here is that prior to Vietnam such things were never openly admitted anywhere in the US; during Vietnam the truth of the anti-democratic nature of the US was hotly debated; during the Iraq War the US government’s foundation of criminality is openly admitted at the very top… and no one cares.
In an era when every American is tracked – from credit scores, to the location of their cell phone, to what they wrote on the internet 15 years ago – and people can be droned at will, the average American has no choice to but to pretend that they are going along with it all. It is not all Trump and Pompeo – the executive powers, which reduce the American system to investing a dictator’s powers in the presidency, were installed by Bush II and increased by Barack “Dronebama” Obama.
The system has spread to their neo-imperial allies, as proven by France’s 2-year state of emergency, the “French Patriot Act”, and current President Emmanuel “Rubber Bullet President” Macron, who forces through sweeping American-style economic changes via executive order. “False life syndrome” is thus a Western phenomenon, and not only that of their American leader.
The epidemic expansion of “false life syndrome” which began in 2003 is also behind the pathetic, woefully unfair reason Soleimani is now dead:
The Democratic Party elite refused to admit the real reasons for their democratic unpopularity, so they concocted a diversionary Russophobia campaign as well as a campaign to impeach Trump (i.e., to undemocratically reverse the election). In 2020, to distract from this month’s expected impeachment vote Trump killed Soleimani. It’s more “false life” syndrome, because everyone knows the impeachment is the emptiest of politics as Trump is certain to be acquitted. “Think of the contrast,” top House Republican Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter. “While Democrats are trying to remove President Trump from office, the President is focused on removing terrorists from the face of the earth.” In an election year Trump needed another WMD-like falsity to perpetuate, knowing full well that it would be publicly promoted by many, and he so he murdered Soleimani.
What a crying injustice that an anti-terror hero died in large part because of immoral, domestically despised, primary school-level US domestic politics!
Soleimani was killed to preserve US capitalism-imperialist domination of the Muslim World above all, but the dishonest, unreflective political farce which has reigned since 2003 in America is the leading secondary factor.
Everybody in the world knows this modern truth: Washington defines a terrorist as “someone who disagrees with Washington and Wall Street”. Be you Iranian, Iraqi, a journalist like Julian Assange or an average American – oppose US neo-imperialism and neoliberalism and you will be treated as a terrorist.
I am certain that the average American realizes this obvious subtext to these slanderous, absurdly false claims against anti-terror hero Soleimani, but it is 2020 and not 1970 – it seems you can’t expect the truth from a huge number of Americans anymore?
Maybe we can after the US finally leaves Iraq?
This didn’t just start in 2003 but in 1990 (and there is a strong case back to WW2).
How can we forget that between the two gulf wars the US bombed Iraq for ten years(!) while in the same ten year period the US was preparing the ground and up to its eyes in mischief in the Balkans and finally bombed Serbia in 1999. A consistent trajectory runs right through Clinton, Bush, and Obama to Trump. They each have a different public persona but underneath are beholden to the same button pushing rich and powerful warmongering elites.
Ramin
Warshington which is totally in the clutches to the Deep State has discovered that the old adage “if you repeat a lie often enough…” has been so effective that they now use this strategy indiscriminately and recklessly no matter how ludicrous or farcical the lie happens to be.
Drumpf and his goon squad fit in rather well in all of this since they are all as individuals compulsive liars and/or foaming at the mouth Neocons themselves. They have become more and more emboldened and inebriated with their own power whilst in office and subsequently vastly more reckless.
This latest debacle with Drumpf murdering Suleimani is a classic example and perfectly demonstrates his dangerous self-contradictory idiocy. This astonishing act was in effect an unpredictable self-obsessed lunatic unilaterally gambling with the very survival of humanity. I think the main driving force was to demonstrate to the world just how tough he is. What he demonstrated instead was just how dumb and weak he is. You simply can not get any more irresponsible than this.
As tragic and cruel as this whole scenario is, there is a good side. Now that this whole strategy has been taken to this utterly outrageous level under this regime and used with no shroud or shame whatsoever, it is almost impossible for Global Mainstreet not to see through this and to call it out for exactly what it is.
The Neocons and their Hegemon are losing on all fronts. The deluded feckless Drumpf is accelerating the process. The empire finds itself in its death throes.
And what did Russia and China have to do in all of this as it unfolds? Well actually… nothing at all…the Empire is so busy destroying itself from within that the best strategy is to interfere as little as possible. With Drumpf ‘at the helm’ it is full steam ahead. Just keep out of the way of these bludgeoning idiots as much as is humanly possible and let them get on with it.
Cheers from the south seas
Col
By the way, the hysterical Arch Islamaphobe Greg Hunter just had another outburst in his typically mistake-ridden atrocious ‘English’.
Amusingly the music clip in the link below is by ‘Talking Heads’…which is exactly what this moronic seething bigot has become himself.
I have copied and pasted this latest comment to illustrate just how dangerous and partisan he has become. He is now officially a Neocon asset but is way too dumb to realize the fact.
Anthony Australia01/08/2020 •
Most of the fires in Australia have been deliberately lit. Authorities have known since September.
So much for climate change.
Talking Heads classic
https://youtu.be/LQiOA7euaYA
Reply
Greg Hunter01/08/2020 •
Jail every Muslim who set a fire after a long time in jail. Take all their assets to if they have any.
Greg
YCHMTSU
Col
”To believe that Americans truly believe the endless lies of their post-2003 governments is to assume that Americans are either deluded or mentally disabled, and neither are true: Americans know they are poorly governed but now feel powerless to resist the injustice of their own leaders.”
Firstly, ’deluded’ and ’mentally disabled’ are what describe the majority US population to a T. I have said it before and I re-iterate: Bourgeois ideology merits mental hospitalization, as the Soviets correctly noted. The gun-toting and mass-murder along with the ’Constitution this, amendment that’ psychobabble prove the point superbly.
Secondly, Pindos’ perception of being poorly governed and powerless is very much the same as that prevalent among the Euro-trash: Why doesn’t our beloved 1% let us enjoy the spoils of imperialism in harmony and without any wrecking austerity? Global apartheid was so great, and now the 1% suddenly has switched to trashing the Western Heimat with the great unwashed?!?
Regarding the immigration, it is partly a justified, appropriate reaction to a — possibly unintended — result brought about by the mental illness of bourgeois LGBTQ ”culture”. Whitey has become too fat, lazy, and infatuated with buggery to breed. And the alt-Right dullards blame Coudenhove-Kalergi, LOL.
Sadly, many Americans get their news thru the MSM solely and are propagandized by it. I suspect that is one reason why there is so much alcohol/cocaine/opioid addiction. The Administrations routinely lie, and the opposition party does not use this to attack the administration but perpetuates the lie. I have read in the alt media some good info about Soleimani, but all the politicians repeat the Zionist lies about him. Of course in the long term a nation’s foreign policy built on lies will end in disaster.
How things change – from 12 May 2014
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/ultra_lutra/85831081/15474/15474_original.jpg
I looked, and this is not a real Newsweek cover.
It’s interesting, as this is all over the internet, but I looked and this was not their cover. Certainly, the addition of “nemesis” is contradictory.
It’s interesting, because who wastes their time making this stuff, lol? Newsweek did run a flattering article about Soleimani, calling him a “mastermind”, and I added the link in my most recent article, so why go to the trouble of putting him in the cover?
Why do people do stuff for free on the internet? We journalists cannot understand that, but we are trained to check and triple check, lol.
Khamenei was on the cover of their last issue of 2019, with a caption of if Iran falls ISIL wins. I include that link as well. Reality is always more interesting than fiction. I also point out that Newsweek does not care about Iraq or beating ISIL, and certainly not like Soleimani and Iran does.
@It’s interesting, because who wastes their time making this stuff, lol?
I did mention that the military are professional pranksters, they would have the resources and desires to pull something like that off. Then follow up on it any which way but the truth.
Gen. Soleimani’s Key Role in Counter-Terrorism Admitted by All Sides
“General Soleimani is acknowledged by all sides to have been the key commander in organizing and
helping coordinate the campaign against those terrorist groups which were supported by US allies as
they had freely admitted these days US allies at one stage from Qatar but also from the (United Arab)
Emirates, from Saudi in particular, and from Turkey later on, from Israel as well in the South of Syria
for example,” Professor Tim Anderson told Tasnim in an interview.
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/01/08/gen-soleimanis-key-role-in-counter-terrorism-admitted-by-all-sides-australian-prof/
So now the audience is arguing as to when the Americans first started to use lies and deceit in their political spheres. May I suggest that that behaviour goes back to Cain and Abel. It is the wrong approach. America has been called ‘The Great Satan’ for decades for one specific reason; it has lost contact with God.
And now both America and Canada are claiming that the latest Boeing aircraft to crash in Iran was shot down by an Iranian missile. and everybody has forgotten the work I did on MH370.
MH370 was a Boeing, and every Boeing since about 2006 is fitted with an ‘Anti-terrorist’ system that allows the CIA to take control of that aircraft in the case where a ‘Terrorist’ hijacking has occurred. Of course America and the CIA would never abuse such a ‘takeover’ system, would they?
There is your first of many psy-ops the Americans will use against Iran.
Don’t fly Boeing is all I can warn you of.
Thanks Ramin.
Always a treat to read and you are so damned spot on. You were on fire, I sensed the irritation if not anger. With good reason.
The Saker has written recently something about the split in American society between people aware that they are being fooled, and the braindead MSM and Kardashian watchers. I have no clear view about that being on the other side of the ocean. I can only say that when I was in the USA for a week, I sensed a deep rift between people in the cities and on the countryside, just like in France. Maybe you’ll recognize that.
The deep shame of our times is the handling of Julian Assange, glad you mentioned it. Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh were at least by part of the public seen as heroes in their time, and Assange is simply forgotten and will most probably die in prison in total silence of politicians, public, and self-inflicted social justice warriors and woke celebrities.
What the hell have we become.
All the best, cheers, Rob
“Most of the fires in Australia have been deliberately lit. Authorities have known since September.
So much for climate change.”
I am sorry Greg Hunter did another of these rants, because I think he means to be a good reporter. On the other hand, he is not as reliable as were I. F. Stone, Elmer Davis, Edward R.Murrow, or Seymour Hersh.
But just as an intellectual exercise (I do not actually believe it), let me grant this point, that most of these fires were deliberately lit. If it were not because of the recent record breaking temperatures, drought conditions, and high winds, these deliberately lit fires would not take hold, would not spread so rapidly, and cause so devastatingly great damage. So this is not evidence that there is no climate change. It is not actually proof of climate change either, though it is a good warning as to its possibility. Remember: climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.