[Peace-discuss] The Iran campaign…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Article by Ed Herman. An extract (from ZNet):

…Uncle Chutzpah and his willing executioners—the media, UN and  
coalition of the cowardly and bribed—have isolated Iran and set her  
up for possible destabilization and aggression. One wouldn’t think  
this possible given the remarkable parallels in argument and (phony)  
evidence in this case and that of the failed aggression in Iraq, but  
the power of the aggressor and subservience of the media and  
international community are apparently boundless.
It is certainly not assured that Iran will be attacked, and if it is  
attacked that is most likely to be by bombs only, but it can well  
happen. The stage is being set, and the folks likely to make those  
decisions are proven killers, torturers and law violators, confident  
in their military superiority and invulnerability to prosecution for  
criminal behavior and with a great capacity for righteous self- 
deception. And the international community is not only doing nothing  
to stop them, it is helping them prepare the “(im)moral” and quasi- 
legal groundwork . The leaders of the aggressor state are also  
politically astute, and recognize the political value of war as a  
means of retrieving political fortunes. They may be failures at home  
as well as abroad, but their service to the business community has  
been far-reaching, and those successes have protected and sustained  
them. To continue them, as they damage the great majority, may  
require forcible action. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out a hundred  
years ago, “The direct cultural value of a warlike business policy is  
unequivocal. It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the  
populace…At the same stroke, it directs popular interest to other,  
nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal  
distribution of wealth” (The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904],  
pp. 391-3). When each day you are adding to your service to the rich  
and damaging the majority, war can come in handy to get folks to turn  
again to the “nobler, institutionally less hazardous” matters like  
stopping the dire threat of an Iranian bomb.

--mkb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20060314/35e240a6/attachment.htm