[Peace-discuss] The Next U.S.-Israeli Target (Iran)

[Morton K. Brussel]

An extract from a longer analysis of the Iran situation by one of the  
most cogent of critics of U.S Policy.
The whole article by Herman and Peterson is at ZNet:

Hegemony and Appeasement: Setting Up the Next U.S.-Israeli Target  
(Iran) For Another "Supreme International Crime"

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=11963

4. In contrast with Iran’s bluster but non-threats, both the United  
States and Israel have made quite open threats to attack Iran, with  
U.S. officials speaking regularly of  their objective as “regime  
change” in Tehran. This is normalized in the media, which transform  
Iran’s bluster and non-threats into very worrisome concerns, while  
making the quite explicit and realistic U.S. and Israeli threats into  
reasonable reactions to the politically-constructed threat posed by  
Iran. In one of  Condoleezza Rice's classic expressions, matching her  
claim that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon marked the “birth pangs of  
a new Middle East,” Rice treats the open Israeli threat against Iran  
as a regrettable but understandable consequence of Iran’s refusal to  
terminate nuclear activities--which have never been shown to be  
anything but peaceful and permitted under the Treaty on the Non- 
Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT): “I think that even talk of  
such [military operations against Iran] just shows how very serious  
it would be to have Iran continue its program unabated.”13 That  
Iran’s nuclear program, on the unproven assumption that it has  
weapons in mind, might be an understandable response to the Israeli  
open threat to use nuclear weapons on Iran, is outside her—or the  
Western media’s—orbit of thought.
Although these U.S.-Israeli threats are splashed across headlines and  
television screens around the globe, and violate the UN Charter’s  
prohibition against states engaging in the “threat or use of force  
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any  
state,” and although these threats are made by two states that have  
committed the “supreme international crime” in Iraq and Lebanon in  
2003 and 2006, respectively, the UN and international community take  
no cognizance of  these Charter violations and the threat its authors  
pose for a further major war.  Instead the new Secretary-General  
speaks of the UN and United States having a “shared objective of  
promoting human rights, democracy and freedom and peace and  
security,”14 and the Security Council continues to cooperate actively  
with the threatening global rogue state as it and its client prepare  
for a further war of aggression. 
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