CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Why is the US in Iran?

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” – Attributed to various sources. “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” – Zhou En-lai (cited by William Blum)

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

– Attributed to various sources.

“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

– Zhou En-lai (cited by William Blum)

There is no irreducible answer to this query. There are multiple factors driving US-Israeli aggression in that country, and the rest of the Middle East. Most visibly, US officials and their propaganda organs in the media and in government align with Israel’s cold-blooded, supremacist hostility toward Iran and other Muslim countries.

American ruling circles, with few exceptions, appear incapable of understanding that the humiliation Iran in 1979 (the “hostage crisis”) inflicted on the US was of America’s own making. The state/media establishment has produced no useful propaganda to offset this recurring reality.

There is a second order of explanation that looks to the dark influence of Israel on US Middle East policy. Israeli propaganda depicts the Zionist state as a victim of Tehran by virtue of the material support it gives to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in their backing of the Palestinian cause and blocking Israeli territorial expansion. The US mainstream power structures have wholly bought into this narrative, portraying the allies of Palestinian freedom, including Iran, as “terrorist” state organizations.

If nothing else, the Israeli propaganda machinery has until recently been masterful at manipulating public opinion through a well-coordinated state project known as Hasbara. But Hasbara is not only about planting stories in the press and TV news of key allied states, such as the US, UK, and France.

It also provides free trips to Israel for foreign politicians, finances their election campaigns, especially in the US and UK, arranges overseas tours for Israeli celebrities, recruits speakers at university events, and constantly renews and instrumentalizes public memory of the Holocaust, such as by actively collaborating with the American film and TV industries to produce sympathetic films on the theme of Jewish suffering and the Zionist project.

Israel also maintains an organization, Camera, which surveils Israel’s image in the US and other countries, ready to pounce on factual public representations of the condition of the Palestinian people. Until the recent slaughter in Gaza, Israeli propaganda was quite successful at flipping the meaning of victimhood, in effect turning the Holocaust upside down.

The racist apartheid Jewish state now seeks a final solution for non-Jews living in their midst and lebensraum for their land-hungry settlers in the........

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