I just finished drafting the following letter to my newspaper before reading this latest piece by Parry.
To The Editor:
The editorial “In Our Opinion” printed here last Sunday repeated the lie that it was faulty intelligence that led to the disastrous and illegal invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the actual real intelligence squarely determined that Al Qaeda was an enemy of Sadam’s Iraq, that Iraq’s capacity and possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” had been dismantled and destroyed after the First Gulf War, that Iraq had little or no capacity to strike the US, and further that Iraq had no involvement in the attack on 9/11. More damning yet, sober and responsible experts on the Middle East warned that the invasion and destruction of Iraq would ignite a sectarian civil war that would probably spread beyond Iraq’s borders. This is exactly the present outcome we ourselves have created. The “faulty intelligence” were lies invented and promulgated by Dick Cheney, et al.
Dwight Eisenhower, that former Republican President, warned America of a “Military Industrial Complex (MIC)” which threatened to consume not only the government, but the heart and soul of America. And so it has come to pass with the neocons who, far from being out of power, still have a stranglehold on the blood and treasure of this nation, and seem eager to launch even wider catastrophic destruction and failure.
For over a decade US intelligence agencies, as well as those of Israel, have determined that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has not even made a decision whether it wants nuclear weapons. The Iranian Ayatollahs assert that nuclear weapons contradict Muslim teaching, and they aren’t generally known to misrepresent their religious beliefs. More pragmatically, I suspect they could have had a bomb long ago if they really wanted one, but have decided it’s a zero-sum game; their use of such a weapon would cause their own annihilation.
Iran’s real crime, which the blood-thirsty hawks of the US Military-Industrial-Security-Complex can never forgive, is freeing itself from the grasp of western colonialism, and not for being radical or sponsoring terrorism. After WWII a grass-roots nationalist movement arose there and won a majority in the secular democratic government. The 1953 coup engineered by the US/UK against Mosaddeq and the nationalists not only crushed that earlier independence movement, but also Iranian democracy, and we replaced it with the monarchy of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, our puppet ruler. US talk about democracy and freedom were empty lies, a fact which the entire Middle East witnessed, and the US aided the Shah in creating SAVAK, a brutal Iranian national police apparatus. The Iranians have just cause to fear and distrust America.
The anti-Iran hysteria of many in Washington which is dutifully sensationalized by the media, echoes the manufactured hysteria used to bully US citizens into supporting Bush’s debacle in Iraq. Polls continue to show popular US support for diplomacy over war, but the professional political class now only listens to the MIC. And there is hardly a more corrupt or larger sponsor of terrorism than our current ally, Saudi Arabia.
Sincerely,
Not enough word limit (500 max) to draw all the necessary conclusions that Parry does, but will directly challenge the local papers’ jump onto the insane war-wagon.