Christian Science Monitor files decent article on US-Iran confrontation
Editor's Note
Readers may be forgiven for chuckling at our headline. Yes, it has become news, in the tradition of that old standard, "Man bites dog," when a major newspaper in the US discharges its journalistic function with probity and professionalism. Especially in regard to the nasty developments in the Middle East, where any day now we may be faced with the stuff of nightmares.
While massively ignorant, insouciant Americans continue to go about their merry business without fullly realising the real danger posed by the Trump administration's obsessive bellicosity towards Iran, the stakes keep getting higher and higher. The constant provocations and vituperations (started by the US, which has also unlawfully applied a murderous sanctions regime leaving Iran no option but to respond), have finally put the US-led bloc and Iran into a hard-to-avoid collision course, whose consequences for Iran, the Middle East in general, the already wounded planetary ecology, and the global economy are simply mind-boggling.
This is bad enough, the work of morons, bullies, liars, and certifiable sociopaths, a pattern that by now defines the highest echelons of the US government in this period of clear moral and political decomposition, but things could easily get much worse and a lot uglier—as they usually do in wars—especially if the US, long accustomed to fighting wars "on the cheap" in terms of real casualties and actual enemy retaliation, were to suffer some significant losses in its pricey military hardware or armed forces personnel. Can anyone imagine the howls for revenge, for Iran's nuclear obliteration, from the criminal ly sanctimonious politicians and media hyenas, if such a thing came to pass? I certainly can, and I shudder at the thought because the carnage would be swift and horrific. A nation long soaked in self-flattering ignorance, hubris, and malignant exceptionalism, not to mention armed to the teeth, and looking to show it's still the big cock on the block, is a prime candidate to detonate Armageddon. Piles of radioactive ash in many continents may not be a wild exaggeration.
In this terrible context, the behaviour of the US press, even at this late hour, when some sense should have percolated, continues to be abysmal. It doesn't help that "the adults in the room", organisations like the New York Times or the WaPo, or the leading TV networks, should be leading the warmongering chorus instead of calming things down, a moral obligation all the more pressing due to the near total absence of an antiwar movement in the United States. I will not ask here whether these people—to paraphrase Joe Welch's legendary question to Joe McCarthy—have any decency left. We know the answer to that. But has the media industry, including its owning barons, the Murdochs, the Redstones, the Sulzbergers, the Bezos, reached such a level of imbecility and narrow self-seeking that they have also lost their instinct for survival?
It is in this squalid context that I note this morning (thanks to our colleague at Moon of Alabama) that The Christian Science Monitor has come out with a piece that, considering the American media's record on this matter, is remarkable for its truth and balance, even if the overall picture remains painfully short of what we would have liked to see in a piece dedicated to explaining not just where we are at this point, but how we got there. Obviously the staff writer, Scott Peterson, had a tall order to fill. This may explain why he apparently came close to "playing it down the middle", almost sounding as if Iran, for decades a demonstrable victim of Anglo-American imperialism, was as guilty of this horrid mess as the sordid figures in Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Ryad, and other Western and Middle East capitals openly planning for its destruction. Blaming both sides is an old conceit of US journalism, forever chasing the illusory "objectivity" that reality continues to deny in most cases of imperial criminality.
That said, my thanks to Peterson, and the Christian Science Monitor editors. I hope the example catches. Below excerpts from this article.
—Patrice Greanville
Dateline: 12 July 2019
US-Iran escalation: It’s message-sending, but the risks are high
[The Christian Science Monitor]
WHY WE WROTE THIS
The U.S. and Iran each want something. But they are expressing that through sanctions and military provocations. How high can they escalate tensions before it slips out of their control?
Colossally expensive carriers, instruments to project power and intimidate little nations, have long been the signature of the American empire in practically all latitudes. The official CSM caption reads: "A pilot speaks to a crew member by an F/A-18 fighter jet on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea on June 3. In response to harsher U.S. sanctions, Iran has broken through uranium enrichment and stockpile limits set by the 2015 nuclear deal." (Jon Gambrell/AP)
July 12, 2019
Another day, another step in the apparently inexorable escalation of U.S.-Iran tensions that has brought the arch-adversaries to the brink of war since President Donald Trump last year withdrew from the nuclear deal.
The escalation has included a U.S. “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign that has crippled Iran’s economy and targeted its supreme leader and elite Revolutionary Guard; incremental Iranian violations of the landmark 2015 deal; Iran shooting down a $130 million U.S. intelligence drone; and Mr. Trump at the last minute calling off a retaliatory surgical strike – while planes were reportedly mid-route.
The result: the U.S. and Iran have not been this close to open conflict since the 1980s.
Which raises two very pressing questions: What is the psychology of escalation at play? And how far can this tit-for-tat trajectory go without stumbling into a war that leaders on both sides say they don’t want?
Mr. Trump states that his aim is to pressure the Islamic Republic to negotiate a new deal that includes limiting Iran’s missile forces and curtailing regional proxies. But hawkish aides like his national security adviser, John Bolton, have argued for years for military strikes on Iran and regime change.
For their part, Iranian officials vow that they will not negotiate under pressure, state that America can’t be trusted, and declare – as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently did – that talking to the Trump administration would be poison “twice as deadly.”
And while Iran stuck to the nuclear deal for a year after the U.S. withdrawal – imploring the European Union, Russia, and China to uphold their side of the bargain, even if the U.S. did not, by providing Iran with economic benefits in exchange for Iran curtailing its nuclear program – analysts say the consensus has grown in Iran to take action.
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