By David Macilwain
Truth was a casualty of this war long before the US-Israel launched its volleys of missiles at Tehran. To re-phrase the old maxim – ‘war is the first casualty of lies’ – and never was it so true as now. This war – humankind’s third and surely last world war – was built on an edifice of lies, ingeniously constructed over many years and in multiple theatres by the aggressors; that is US.
But so focused have we been on the weaving of this web of lies, with our think tanks and experts and advisors, government departments and security agencies, that we failed to notice the world outside our ‘information space’. Not only was that world mostly unaware of the lies we told ourselves – about them – but it would have dismissed them as one might dismiss the ravings of a drunkard, knowing him to be deluded and incoherent. This perhaps was their fatal error.
Alcohol notoriously increases the desire but decreases the ability, in matters of love and hate; in the most intoxicated and delusional, self-destruction is the most likely outcome. People of ‘good faith’ also repeatedly attribute similar character traits to their opponents, failing to realise this works both ways; those of a devious and antagonistic nature assume their opponents to be lying until proven otherwise. But the relationship is not equal; ‘might’ always prevails over ‘right’. Neither are there ‘half-truths’ to absolve the aggressors and collaborators of guilt and responsibility for the destruction they bring to the world of their victims, and inevitably to their own populations as well.
So now, as it starts to sink into some of the thicker skulls around us that our allies and partners have brought the world crashing down on our heads as well as those of our opponents, attempts to rationalise or justify what we have done only expose complicity; such is the case with an extraordinary proposal from the Honourable Gareth Evans, re-published by P&I from Project Syndicate on the 8th day of our war on Iran.
Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister in the Labor government from 1988 to 1996, has long argued the case for ‘responsibility to protect’, taking part in a Canadian initiative in 2001 which discussed the limits to state sovereignty. This discussion followed from the Kosovo ‘Intervention’, and earlier atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia which happened during Evans’ time as foreign minister. His reference to these humanitarian disasters highlights one fault in the intervention case, in the inability of ‘Western-oriented’ NGOs and their governments to fairly adjudicate on contested affairs, of which NATO’s violent Kosovo ‘intervention’ was certainly one.
Rather than set an example of legitimate intervention to save a threatened ethnic group, the 70-day campaign launched without UN authorisation and in collaboration with the Al Qaeda-linked KLA, set the scene for the US-NATO insurgencies post 9/11 in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There the covert use of foreign Islamist mercenaries to destabilise governments enabled US access to their resources – Opium in Afghanistan, Oil in Iraq and Oil, Gas and Wheat in Syria. In all these cases the alleged pretext for ‘intervention’ was a lie, whether to ‘destroy Al Qaeda’, remove a brutal dictator, improve women’s rights, or in Syria’s case, to support ‘Syrian opposition rebels’ against the ‘repressive Assad government’.
In addition, one ‘intervention’ under ‘R2P’ that did have UN authorisation – the bombing of Libya and violent removal of its government – destroyed Libya’s society and economy while enabling radical Muslim Brotherhood forces to seize control. The lies that enabled that Western-sponsored atrocity have been well exposed, though with little acknowledgement of the real agenda – sabotaging Moammar Qadhafi’s development of a pan-African currency and independence from foreign exploitation.
Gareth Evans was also CEO of the International Crisis Group during the 2000’s, a think tank working for conflict resolution and peace, and with some positive features beside its links to pro-NATO groups. The ICG was involved in negotiating the JCPOA under Obama and has more recently been accused of ‘pro-Iranian sympathies’ for pursuing improved communication between Iran and Western governments. Significantly this positive initiative was ‘exposed’ by the anti-Iranian media group ‘Iran International’ – which now holds sway over Western media, and is opposed to any sort of reconciliation with the Iranian government.
The ABC’s Kathryn Diss interviewed some of Iran International’s journalists, speculating on their return to Iran should ‘the regime fall’. More disturbingly, she also spoke to Barack Seener from the notorious Henry Jackson society, a think tank with intimate links to the UK government, as this article demonstrates. I have written before on the primary influence of the Iranian diaspora on governments and media, and its evident exploitation by and collaboration with the ‘Israel lobby’, in spreading gross disinformation about the situation in Iran to gain public acceptance and support for the current ‘regime change’ operation.
This long-running disinformation campaign – aiming to legitimise such an operation to remove Iran’s military, political and religious leadership, reached its apogee in January, when the Mossad-CIA-MI6 troika launched protest-riots targeting public facilities, police and security, and protestors with deadly violence. After an initial destabilisation of the Iranian currency by the US which caused protest rallies by traders in Tehran, the scene was set for the foreign infiltration and false-flag protests, resulting in the killing of 2500 odd civilians including around 300 police and security. Security forces killed over 600 of the violent armed attackers in self defence and in defence of the public, resulting in a total death toll of 3,115, along with many more seriously injured. Dozens of people were burnt to death as rioters set fire to mosques and targeted ambulances and emergency services.
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Arabic two days after the January 8-9th riots, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described what happened, and how the riots were brought to a halt when the Starlink terminals used to coordinate their activities were unexpectedly interrupted. What happened next went unreported, but was actually the most significant achievement of the foreign conspiracy; popular revulsion at the killing of police and particularly at the destruction of mosques, banks and other community facilities brought millions of protestors out onto the streets in towns and cities around the country in a show of solidarity with the government and country. Following the attacks of the ‘12-day war’ the previous June, Iranians had already fallen in behind their government, as would be expected.
Despite this obvious failure of the West’s latest attempt to provoke a popular uprising, a second strand began to spread throughout Western media, initiated by a number of foreign-based ‘Iranian Human Rights’ groups and a news coordinator – HRANA. The figure of ‘protestors killed by the regime’ at that time was estimated as around 2,600, not far from the actual figure of civilians and Iranian security killed by the insurgents and local recruits. These included thugs and criminals hired in provinces around the country, alongside Kurdish militants and takfiris moved in from Azerbaijan, Iraq and Baluchistan, according to analysts like Alastair Crooke, here in discussion with Lt Col Daniel Davis on the eve of the war.
What happened subsequently however was an extraordinary disconnection in the narratives within and without Iran; many funerals took place around Iran in the following days, with huge rallies protesting against the US-Israel led attack, but few further reports of anti-government protests. By contrast in Western media a new narrative developed, that ‘the regime’ had machine-gunned and massacred thousands, following unverified reports from hospitals and activists. Figures of six or seven thousand killed in the two days somehow grew to 20,000 and then 30,000, accompanied by ‘some reports of three times that number’. And astonishingly, the figure of 30,000 killed in just 48 hours has become established as the truth.
Given the pervasive nature of this corrosive fabrication across all Western media and commentators, and accepted as true by such honourable voices for Gaza as Francesca Albanese, and our own David Shoebridge, perhaps it is unsurprising that Gareth Evans has fallen for this ‘mother of all lies’ and the associated demonisation of Iran’s leadership. To quote:
“Nonetheless, can one still argue that, whatever the law, the monstrous crimes of Iran’s theocratic leadership justify its military decapitation? The charge sheet against the regime, both at home and abroad, is long and ugly, culminating in the slaughter of tens of thousands of peacefully protesting citizens earlier this year – an atrocity comparable in intensity to those committed in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, and more recently in Myanmar and Sudan.”
Gareth Evans further exposes himself to charges of complicity in the assassination of Iran’s revered spiritual leader, whose martyrdom has united the Iranian nation behind his son Mojtaba, in defence of the Iranian Revolution, claiming that:
“The joyful celebrations in Iranian streets and among diaspora communities following the news that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been killed tell a compelling story. This is a war, at least in its initial stages, more welcomed than feared by a sizeable mass – perhaps even the majority – of Iran’s citizens.”
An estimated 30 million Iranians came onto the streets of towns and cities across the country in a combination of shock, grief and anger at the dastardly Israeli missile attack on the Ayatollah’s home, as it launched the illegal war of aggression that now relentlessly and unstoppably expands towards world war. And as the consequences of the global fuel shortage following cessation of traffic through the Straits of Hormuz play out in highly import dependent countries like Australia, we should remember and understand Iran’s warning to the aggressors – that they will bear ALL responsibility for what follows from their legitimate defensive response.
