{"id":296299,"date":"2024-10-08T07:00:37","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T07:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=296299"},"modified":"2024-10-09T07:32:27","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T07:32:27","slug":"bret-stephens-says-the-us-must-attack-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=296299","title":{"rendered":"Bret Stephens Says the US Must Attack Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joseph Palermo \u2013 AntiWar.com Oct 7, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

High upon his perch atop the New York Times<\/em><\/a> editorial page<\/a>, Bret Stephens offers a full-throated call for the United States to launch a war of aggression against Iran.\u00a0 This featured opinion piece in the \u201cpaper of record\u201d is noteworthy because it reflects the detritus that\u2019s currently swirling around the minds of U.S. foreign policy elites concerning a big war with Iran.<\/p>\n

Mr. Stephens serves up so many glaring omissions in this op-ed that when you finish reading it your eyes will burn as if you had been staring at the sun.\u00a0 He begins with a paragraph-long quotation from the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel assassinated on September 27th with over 80 two-thousand pound \u201cbunker buster\u201d bombs in the Dahiya Shia quarter of South Beirut.\u00a0 He uses the quotation to strongly suggest that Nasrallah\u2019s only real motive in fighting against the Israelis was to \u201ckill all Jews.\u201d\u00a0 Stephens knows how to get a rise out of his readers.<\/p>\n

By smearing Nasrallah as nothing more than an \u201cantisemite\u201d he purposely overlooks the reasons for Hezbollah\u2019s existence in the first place.\u00a0 There was no Hezbollah until after the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its military occupation of the country that lasted for eighteen years.\u00a0 The IDF and their Lebanese proxies killed approximately 17,000 civilians.\u00a0 Nasrallah was born in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon on August 31, 1960.\u00a0 He was a young man during the years of Israeli occupation; and like many Lebanese, he wasn\u2019t very keen on seeing a large piece of his country become another Gaza Strip or West Bank.\u00a0 In 1985, a new resistance group bounded onto the scene as part of the ongoing struggle to push the Israelis out of Lebanon: Hezbollah, \u201cThe Party of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number One: <\/strong><\/h3>\n

De-historicizing and de-contextualizing the origins and objectives of Hezbollah.<\/em><\/p>\n

Next, Stephens asks the rhetorical question: What if those missiles Iran fired at Israel on October 1st had been \u201cnuclear tipped?\u201d\u00a0 This hypothetical scenario indeed would be very scary.\u00a0 But scarier still might be Israel\u2019s response since it\u2019s well known that the IDF has at least 90 nuclear bombs at its disposal.\u00a0 (And B.S. knows this).\u00a0 Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires United Nations experts regularly to inspect and monitor its nuclear facilities.\u00a0 Also, Iran was abiding by the requirements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the most exhaustive nuclear non-proliferation agreement of its kind.\u00a0 It took the Obama Administration two years to negotiate the 2015 agreement.\u00a0 Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told a joint session of the U.S. Congress that he and the Israeli government bitterly opposed the deal.<\/p>\n

The JCPOA stood until 2018 when President Donald J. Trump unceremoniously yanked the United States out of the deal over the vociferous objections of France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union, and the United Nations \u2013 countries that were all signatories to the multilateral contract.<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Two: <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Israel is the only nuclear armed nation in the region.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Slogging onward, Stephens then raises the dubious claim made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon \u201cwithin a week or two.\u201d\u00a0 First, if this were true, it would sure make Stephens\u2019s call for a huge U.S. bombing assault on Iran even more reckless and stupid.\u00a0 It\u2019s also intellectually dishonest because it creates a \u201cticking time bomb\u201d scenario where kinetic military action must be taken now, or else.\u00a0 \u201cNow is the time to do something,\u201d Stephens howls.\u00a0 This cliche is standard warmongering like we heard in the run-up to the Iraq War.\u00a0 The implication here is that the U.S. has been doing \u201cnothing\u201d and now must do \u201csomething.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the U.S. is already doing a lot of \u201csomethings.\u201d\u00a0 The U.S. has slapped on Iran the most severe and longest-standing economic sanctions in history.\u00a0 The U.S. has worked hand-in-glove with Israel to sabotage Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities through aggressive and sophisticated cyber-attacks, such as \u201cStuxnet\u201d and others.\u00a0 The U.S. has assisted, enabled, and cheered on Israel\u2019s multiple assassinations of Iranian scientists, including their top physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was gunned down with an A.I.-automated robot machine gun in Absard, Iran on November 27, 2020.\u00a0 And on January 3, 2020, the United States unilaterally assassinated Iran\u2019s highest-ranking military commander, Qasem Soleimani, outside the Baghdad airport in a drone attack that burned him alive and turned the car he was in into a pile of molten metal.<\/p>\n

Maybe these flamboyant U.S.-Israeli actions targeting Iran in recent years don\u2019t constitute doing \u201csomething\u201d in Stephens\u2019s mind, but to the United Nations Security Council (where Iran has brought many formal complaints against the U.S. and Israel) they appear to count as \u201csomething.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Three: <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Pretending the U.S. and Israel have never done anything untoward to Iran.<\/em><\/p>\n

Stephens declares the current status quo with Iran is \u201cutterly intolerable,\u201d and that Iran is a threat \u201cto the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we\u2019re supposed to lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

This statement is astonishingly myopic coming after a year of U.S.-facilitated atrocities and genocide in Gaza, which contravene the U.N. Charter, multiple U.N. resolutions, the Geneva Conventions, and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), the latter of which has placed under scrutiny both Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for possible violations of international humanitarian law.\u00a0 Where is this \u201cliberal international order\u201d that \u201cwe are supposed to lead\u201d to which Stephens is referring?\u00a0 And who is responsible for tearing it up?<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Four: <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Make-believing the U.S. and Israel have not been perpetrating ghastly violations of international humanitarian law thereby undermining the \u201cliberal international order,\u201d which the author believes will be somehow restored only if the U.S. unleashes a giant bombing assault on Iran. <\/em><\/p>\n

Stephens\u2019s J\u2019accuse!<\/em> against Iran goes on to include the contested charge that Iran had plotted to assassinate Trump, hyperbolically labeling it a \u201cdirect assault on American democracy.\u201d\u00a0 Elsewhere he declares that the Iranians recently offered to negotiate because they \u201cfear that Trump might return to office.\u201d\u00a0 For a columnist who the New York Times <\/em>hired primarily because of his center-right \u201cnever-Trump\u201d bona fides, it\u2019s strange to hear him in October 2024 sounding like a shill for the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n

And after many paragraphs of this bullshit as a set-up, Stephens then transforms himself into an armchair general whose blood is boiling.\u00a0 He cries out for a \u201cdirect\u201d and \u201cunmistakable\u201d U.S. strike on Iran, and takes special note of a missile production facility in the city of Isfahan: \u201cAt a minimum, Biden should order the [\u2018missile complex\u2019] in Isfahan destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDestroyed\u201d \u2013 now we\u2019re getting to the meat of his argument.\u00a0 In the next sentence he points out there\u2019s a \u201curanium enrichment site near Isfahan, too,\u201d making clear to his readers that he would love to see that sight \u201cdestroyed\u201d as well.\u00a0 But that was just the appetizer; now comes the main course: \u201cIran\u2019s economy relies overwhelmingly on a vast and vulnerable network of pipelines, refineries and oil terminals on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf.\u201d\u00a0 Stephens believes the wisest path forward for the U.S. right now is to threaten Iran with annihilating its oil infrastructure and inform the dastardly Iranian government: \u201cthe only way it will save this infrastructure from immediate destruction is by ordering Hezbollah and the Houthis to stand down and pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s that word again: \u201cDestruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Five:\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/h3>\n

Ignoring the fact that Iran has already (on multiple occasions and through multiple channels) communicated to the United States, Israel, and to the world that if they bomb Iran\u2019s oil infrastructure Iran will ensure the oil infrastructures of U.S. client states in the region also will be obliterated, (which one might think is a pretty dangerous oversight in an op-ed calling for the U.S. to bomb Iran\u2019s oil infrastructure).<\/em><\/p>\n

Now on a homicidal tear, Stephens declares: \u201cWe can\u2019t simply go on trying to thwart Iran by defensive means only \u2013 fighting not to win but merely not to lose.\u201d\u00a0 He then narrows the options to a binary; \u201cwe\u201d are either going to \u201cwin\u201d or \u201close\u201d (just like the Bush regime did in the run-up to the Iraq War).\u00a0 <\/em>He has shrunk the parameters of U.S. policy options down to only one: blowing shit up.<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Six:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

He doesn\u2019t tell us what \u201cwinning\u201d means.\u00a0 Does it include \u201cregime change?\u201d\u00a0 Or the Gaza-ization of Iran?\u00a0 After we\u2019ve all witnessed a live-streamed U.S.-backed genocide for a year, the author is now demanding more death, destruction, and human suffering only on a larger scale.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

And what, exactly would the U.S. \u201cwin\u201d after unleashing this aggression on a nation of 90 million people?\u00a0 Two-hundred dollars-a-barrel oil?\u00a0 Another trillion dollars drained from the U.S. treasury?\u00a0 What the fuck is this respected public intellectual really saying?<\/p>\n

Stephens denounces \u201cIranian aggression.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>Yet it was the United States that overthrew Iran\u2019s democratically-elected government in 1953 and installed an unelected tyrant who ruled for 25 years; trained the unelected tyrant\u2019s brutal secret police; and armed Iran\u2019s enemy in a war that claimed a million Iranian casualties.\u00a0 <\/em>It\u2019s the U.S. that has imposed waves of crippling economic sanctions on Iran; assassinated Iran\u2019s top military commander; engaged in cyber warfare against Iranian industrial and research facilities \u2013 and now the U.S. is threatening to destroy Iran\u2019s oil infrastructure and other targets.<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Seven:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Erasing the \u201caggression\u201d the U.S. has directed and continues to direct at Iran over the past 70 years as if it never happened. (I suppose the author believes \u201cthey just hate our freedom?\u201d).<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cBully regimes respond to the stick,\u201d Stephens writes, channeling his inner Teddy Roosevelt.\u00a0 <\/em>He asserts that the recent missile attack on Israeli military targets would have resulted in the deaths of \u201chundreds or thousands\u201d of Israeli lives had it not been for their extensive missile defenses.\u00a0 Yet Iran has been extremely careful not to kill any Israeli civilians in their two missile strikes so far.\u00a0 <\/em>In both cases they gave early warnings to the U.S. beforehand.\u00a0 <\/em>And in both cases, they announced that as far as the Iranian government was concerned there was no need for further retaliation; the score had been settled for the two IDF assassinations, one an Iranian military officer, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, the other in the heart of Tehran targeting Hamas\u2019s chairman of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh.\u00a0 If Iran assassinated a high-ranking IDF officer in Tel Aviv I wonder what would Stephens be calling upon Israel to do in response?<\/p>\n

In the middle of this desolate commentary, Stephens gets philosophical, transforming himself into the Clausewitz of Westchester County.\u00a0 \u201cWars,\u201d he intones, \u201conce entered, need to be fought through to an unequivocal victory.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>\u201cUnequivocal victory?\u201d\u00a0 Like the ones the U.S. fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq?\u00a0 By tossing down the memory hole those three demoralizing, costly and catastrophic U.S. wars while calling for yet another war, Bret Stephens is engaging here in nothing more than bloodthirsty agitprop.<\/p>\n

Glaring Omission Number Eight:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

He offers zero history and zero context even while he waxes philosophic about the underlying purposes and requirements of \u201cWars.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The only thing the meta-text of this piece accomplishes is removing all agency from the Israelis.\u00a0 The Israeli government, the IDF, Mossad, along with their actions in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and now Lebanon, all recede into the background.\u00a0 They disappear.\u00a0 <\/em>He describes a society of sitting ducks, neither acting nor reacting to anything.\u00a0 And in the process absolves them of any responsibility for their deeds over the past year that have left the entire world aghast.\u00a0 <\/em>And in so doing, Bret Stephens is helping us all collectively to forget about the first genocide of the 21st Century.\u00a0 \u201cNever Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph A. Palermo is a Professor of History at Sacramento State University.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times published an opinion piece recently that effectively called on the U.S. to launch a full-on war against Iran. Joseph Palermo exposes the lies and half-truths in the article, which are routinely echoed in the rest of the U.S. corporate media<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,51,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Iran","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296299"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296302,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296299\/revisions\/296302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}