Monday, March 13, 2006

Stop the War on Iran

No, that is not a typographical error. No, I am not confused about where in the Middle East our soldiers are risking their lives in this ill-begotten shame of a war.

I’m talking about the war that’s about to happen.

Stop the War on Iran.

For months now I have spoken to friends and acquaintances of the building war in Iran, and these days it seems to be getting closer and closer.

The rhetorical pattern building to an Iranian confrontation is an exact match for the build-up to the wonderfully disastrous War in Iraq.

I first called it sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2005, long before the debate over enriched uranium, long before the election of the new Iranian president and his subsequent unkind references to Israel, and long before the well-fueled “cartoon crisis” over images of the prophet Mohammed.

I called it way back when I saw an hour-long Fox Nooze Special with a title that was something like "Iran: the Nuclear threat." That title may not be exact, and I'm not sure if there was a question mark or not, but it was a great propaganda piece which sent me a strong signal – Iran is the next planned military target.

The Fox special was chock full of all sorts of FUN rhetorical questions, like "Iran says its pursuit of nuclear energy is for peaceful means only, but could they secretly be pursuing nuclear weapons?”

and

“Should the U.S. consider a pre-emptive attack on Iran?”

If Americans can wind their memories back to the fall of 2002, when weapons inspections were ongoing in Iraq and Bush was promising to exercise all diplomacy possible to avoid a conflict, they might remember the start of a media campaign full of misleading assertions and frightening rhetorical questions which grew and grew until America invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

They might also remember the President declaring victory a few months later, aboard an aircraft carrier and looking strapping in a flashy new flight suit. An observant American might also take Bush’s statements of late 2002 and early 2003, that war was a last option, and compare those to more recent statements where Bush proclaimed his administration WOULD HAVE INVADED IRAQ EVEN IF HE KNEW THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

A similar media campaign has been building around Iran since the fall of 2005. Coincidentally, as the rumble of an Iranian threat is now building to a furor, we find ourselves in the month of March, the same month in which we launched the invasion of Iraq three years ago.

Iraq was only the first target listed in the Bush Machine’s “Axis of Evil.”

The chances now seem very real that the U.S. will take military action against Iran in the near future. The media drumbeat has been pounding, and the majority of the masses seem to have bought into it, with no recollection of the disgrace of the pre-Iraq War war-mongers in the administration and the media.

I felt the War Drum pounding on Iraq in the second half of 2002, and it will always be linked in my mind to the death of my friend Pang Yang (She was a light in this world. God bless her.) because they both hit me at the same time.

The same Drum is now beating heavily with an impending sense of Doom.

A cynic such as myself has no trouble imagining how the nation might be nudged into allowing such a horrible plan to proceed, with the skillful propaganda of the Bush Machine and/or perhaps, under what conspiracy realists (or coincidence theorists)* call a “false flag” operation, which would be blamed on Iran no matter who carried it out.

It wouldn’t be the first time. The “Gulf of Tonkin incident” which precipitated the Vietnam War is just one of many fabrications used to justify throwing American youths by the handful at a mysterious enemy in a far away country.

So back to my point:
STOP THE WAR ON IRAN
Before it starts.

*Note: In the interest of the betterment of language, thought, and society, I will henceforth make a Gods-honest-attempt to refer to “conspiracy theories and theorists” under the more preferable terms “conspiracy realist” and “coincidence theorist.”

Pay attention to language.
Language creates meaning.
When language is distorted, meaning is distorted.

Politicians, press secretaries, public information officers, marketing writers, public relations experts and hordes of other disingenuous individuals and groups make a living by finding ways to control perception and action through language.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home