More Regime Change
In the nearly four years since then, the twisted reality of Official Washington hasn't changed. The mainstream U.S. media is still dominated by the editorialists and news executives who endorsed the invasion of Iraq and who now are determined to seek "regime change" in Iran.
Friedman is back reprising his role as a neocon propagandist with a friendly "pro-democracy" rationale for confrontation. Interestingly, however, he is acknowledging what some neocon critics, such as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have claimed, that the goal of the standoff with Iran isn't really about its alleged nuclear-bomb desires, but rather about the desires for "regime change" among American neocons and Israeli hardliners.
Friedman is arguing that the Obama administration, instead of seeking an agreement that would ensure that Iran will live up to its word that it doesn't want to build a nuclear bomb, should pursue "regime change" by supporting the Green Revolution and promoting "democracy."
The fact that Ahmadinejad was the choice of the majority of the Iranian people doesn't seem to matter much in Friedman's "democratic" calculations. In that, Friedman seems to be expressing a view that he knows what's best for the Iranian people, although he masks that paternalism with his bogus claim that Mousavi actually won.
Surely, Ahmadinejad, like Saddam Hussein, has contributed to his and his nations' problems with wrongful actions and stupid rhetoric, making the work of neocon propagandists all the easier. But the truth is that actions of any national leader can be made to appear more outrageous or more reasonable depending on how the media frames these matters.
For example, Ahmadinejad, a little-educated populist from the Tehran's "street," has made obnoxious and ill-informed comments questioning the Holocaust against Jews during World War II (though I'm told he recognizes his mistake and has agreed to keep his mouth shut on this topic for months).
However, to extrapolate Ahmadinejad's idiotic comments about the Holocaust into a readiness to attack Israel, a rogue nuclear state with hundreds of undeclared nukes, is the kind of logical overreach that we saw before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Back then, the Bush administration conjured up nightmare scenarios of Iraq flying unmanned planes over the United States to spray poison gases.
The game here is always to put what an "enemy" says or might theoretically do in the worst or most alarmist light. Similarly, if the goal is "regime change," then the recent peace-seeking actions of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inà ¡cio Lula da Silva had to be condemned, not praised.
Rejecting a Breakthrough
In what could have been an important breakthrough over Iran's nuclear program, Erdogan and Lula da Silva persuaded Ahmadinejad to accept an agreement, originally brokered by the Obama administration last fall, to send 2,640 pounds of Iran's low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that could only be put to peaceful medical uses.
Yet, even before the revived agreement was announced on May 17, the neocon editors of the Washington Post were already mocking the Brazil-Turkey initiative as "yet another effort to "engage' the extremist clique of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
After the joint Iran-Brazil-Turkey announcement in Tehran, the rhetorical abuse escalated with Washington pundits and administration hardliners, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, treating the leaders of Brazil and Turkey as unwelcome interlopers who were intruding on America's diplomatic turf in an effort to grandstand.
Lula da Silva responded by challenging those Americans who insisted that it was "none of Brazil's business" to act as an intermediary to resolve the showdown with Iran.
"But who said it was a matter for the United States?" he asked. "The blunt truth is, Iran is being presented as if it were the devil, that it doesn't want to sit down" to negotiate, contrary to the fact that "Iran decided to sit down at the negotiating table. It wants to see if the others are going to go along with what (it) has done."
What Friedman revealed in his Wednesday column was that the neocons have no particular interest in a negotiated settlement regarding Iranian nukes; they want an escalation of tensions that can set the stage for either internal upheaval in Iran or an external assault on its military infrastructure.
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