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Iran NIE And The Eight-year Carnival Of Lies | |
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Editor's Note:
Now that the neo-conservative train to war with Iran
seems to have been derailed, we really need to understand
what all this is about. William Pfaff is one of the most
respected journalists in the world who writes on the Middle
East and foreign affairs. He writes from France and rarely
gets picked up by US papers.
We have featured him before... and will probably do so
more often as he has clear thinking that we are all in
need right now.
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Video Clip Of The Week
CIA: Iran Halted Nuke Program in 2003
In a dramatic revelation, the CIA has announced that Iran
halted its nuclear bomb program in 2003 and thus verified
the claims of Bush critics. This major announcement pretty
much makes Iran safe from US or Israeli attack.
View: CIA: Iran Halted Nuke Program in 2003
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The Iran NIE And The Eight-year Carnival Of Lies -
William Pfaff
Paris, December 4, 2007 – The newly released American
National Intelligence Estimate concerning Iran's nuclear
status has been like the discovery of a freshwater spring
in a Carolinas swamp.
In its clarity, professionalism and evident concern for
exact statement it could not be in more contrast with the
bombast, distortion, political rhetoric, dissimulation
and sheer lies with which the American public debate over
Middle and Near East policy has been conducted during most
of the past decade – and thanks to Washington, in most of
the western world as well. How could this have happened?
It seems that this NIE has been ready since the summer. A
ferocious battle to change or suppress it must have been
fought by the president's and Dick Cheney's men, as well
as by the surviving neo-conservatives in the policy
apparatus. Since the document's first internal government
circulation, the president has nonetheless continued saying
that Iran's (non-existent) weapons program threatened world
war III.
Have the president and vice president now simply given
up serious defense of the policies they have ruthlessly
promoted during the last seven years, and the dissimulation
and distortion which accompanied most of those policies?
That would be an admission that the Bush administration
has been worn down or even defeated by forces within the
government itself.
Can having made General Michael Hayden Director of Central
Intelligence and Robert M. Gates Defense Secretary been
sufficient to restore the authority of professional
standards, and belief in public duty and candor, within
the Washington bureaucracy?
An added intimation of presidential defeat was provided
in George W. Bush's willingness to allow Condoleezza Rice
to have her Annapolis conference, and her last grasp for
some kind of Middle Eastern progress. The president's
manifest lack of interest in any of it, during his brief
visit to Annapolis, and his lack of courtesy towards the
Arab leaders who had been bullied or blackmailed into
attending, conveyed the sense of a man who has thrown
down his cards and now simply wants to get his term over
and not look back.
One would like to believe that the appearance of one honest
and professional public policy document in the Washington
debate is harbinger of a springtime of truth and wisdom.
Virtually nothing in the presidential primary season thus
far would justify an assumption that the lies, mendacity
and manipulation would end, whoever was elected president.
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The language of policy and political discussion and debate
in the United States has been poisoned during the last
seven years, in the U.S. and to a considerable extent
abroad, where other governments, and the United Nations,
automatically have adopted the vocabulary and concepts
current in Washington.
The debasement of language is political, due to the
American electoral system, by which campaigning is entire-
ly by unlimited paid television (or radio) advertising,
imposing demagogy and simplism, frequently testing the
limits of defamation and calumny. It also is due to the
power of special interests in Congress and their influence
on the public debate in Washington, distorting argument,
cultivating euphemism, setting the media agenda, and
imposing demagogy.
There has, for example, been little or no honest mainstream
public debate on Iran, Iraq, the Palestinians, the other
Arabs, and Israel, in the United States since the Israeli
war of 1967 and the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The debate has been systematically distorted by consider-
ations of American government desire (and to a considerably
lesser extent, that of the American public) for revenge on
Iran for the 1979 humiliation of the United States, taking
American diplomats prisoner, and the fiasco of the failed
American rescue operation a year later.
It is distorted by Israel's identification of Iran as its
most important enemy in the region, now that Saddam
Hussein's Iraq has been destroyed, producing global efforts
to exaggerate Iran's regional and international importance,
its military potential, and its threat to its neighbors.
It is distorted by a counterproductive American policy to
dominate oil production and commerce in the Middle East
and Persian Gulf, and to exaggerate the true significance
of nuclear proliferation, whose interest to a state like
Iran, confronting major nuclear powers, is wholly
deterrent. Nuclear weapons have no offensive value for a
state like Iran; they simply limit the freedom of action
of others.
The distortion of language distorts reality. The NIE says
Iran gave up its effort to develop nuclear weapons four
years ago. Iran has since has been constantly paraded in
American official statements as a rogue state on its way
to assault the world, against whose power missile defenses
must be constructed in the Czech Republic and Poland.
It has all been bunkum, if not calculated lie. There was
no Iraq mass destruction weapons threat. There is no
Iranian nuclear threat. It was never a serious proposition
that Islamic terrorists had to be fought in Iraq to stop
them from attacking American cities. There has never been
a serious intention in Washington or Jerusalem to allow a
two-states settlement in Israel-Palestine. Allied countries
nonetheless took all these lies seriously. So did the
Palestinians. So, for that matter, did the Iraqis, and
so – most of all – did Americans. As the great American
carnival showman P.T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born
every minute."
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