Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
The investigative journalist Gareth Porter says that U.S. President Donald Trump, whose favorable-rating among Americans is 37%, is determined that regime-change for Iran is needed — overthrowing Iran’s Shia-moderate President Hassan Rouhani, whose favorable-rating in Iran (see p. 10) is 62%.
This would hardly be out-of-character for the current U.S. President. Trump is a far-right, neoconservative, leader, which means that he supports America’s continuing to serve the interests of the fundamentalist-Sunni trillionaire Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and of the Jewish billionaires who control Israel; and both of those aristocracies hate Shia, and especially hate the leading Shia nation, which is Iran, and intend to take it over. (The Saud family have been rabidly hostile toward Shia ever since 1744, when Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore an eternal oath — binding upon their descendants and followers — to destroy Shia.) Regime-change for Iran has been the U.S. aristocracy’s policy ever since 1979, and the billionaire liar Donald Trump won the White House by denying that he was a neoconservative — even his fellow-neoconservatives believed his lies about that and came out publicly backing the unashamed neoconservative Hillary Clinton (which helped to convince many of America’s non-fascists to vote for Trump). Only few Americans are neoconservatives, but the few who are, are virtually all either American aristocrats or else lobbyists or other agents for same. Neoconservatism is the American aristocracy’s foreign policy, and long has been. Trump’s public statements against neoconservatives and their polices, were a major part of the appeal he had to voters, and helped to fool many people to think he cared about people other than himself and his narrow tribe.
In 1953, the U.S. Government overthrew the democratically elected progressive secular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced him with the (likewise secular, but unelected and tyrant, no progressive at all) Pahlavi Shah, whose torture chambers became famous; and Iranians finally overthrew him twenty-six years later, in 1979, while imprisoning for 444 days the U.S. Embassy personnel in Tehran who had controlled their country through him; and, ever since 1979, the U.S. Government has been trying to re-impose its proxy-rule there, through some stooge whose identity hasn’t yet been decided. That’s what America’s ‘democracy’ (which is approved by 37% of Americans) is trying to do to Iran’s ‘dictatorship’ (which is approved by 62% of Iranians): it’s trying to (re-)impose an American dictatorship there. Obviously, lots of military muscles would be needed in order to achieve that, and Trump’s ‘Defense’ Secretary, James Mattis, was chosen as the point-person to manage that job.
Israel is allied with the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the Sauds, who hate all Shia and consider them an “existential threat.” Because fundamentalist Jews have a far better reputation amongst the American people than do fundamentalist Muslims (of either the Sunni or Shia type), the Sauds wisely decided to use the Israel lobby in Washington to push their own — and the Israeli Government’s — Middle Eastern agenda: a Middle East where only Jews (in Israel) and fundamentalist Sunnis (everywhere else there) control the governments. But the U.S. aristocracy want Iran not only because the Sauds and Israelis do, but because America’s aristocrats hate Russia (ours always wanted to control the world’s largest land-mass and all of its natural resources) and because Russia is allied with Shia and seculars, just as America is allied with the opposite: fundamentalists of three types: Christian, Jewish, and Sunni — but not Shia.
In 2002, the U.S. aristocracy wanted regime-change in Iraq, but now they want regime-change in Iran, and also in Syria (which is ruled by Bashar al-Assad, who is both a Shia and a proponent of separation between church and state).
Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson phrased the matter this way on October 26th: “As we’ve said many times before, the United States wants a whole and unified Syria with no role for Bashar al-Assad in the government. The United States remains committed to providing leadership in every region of the world.” That evidently includes in Syria (regime-change there), and not only in Iran (and, in fact, the U.S especially wants to rule in Russia) — but Syria today, Iran tomorrow, and then Russia afterwards, not all-at-once, is clearly the plan. After the Sauds caused 9/11, we invaded first Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, then Syria, and Trump clearly has Iran and North Korea in America’s gun-sights right now.
The U.S., with the world’s highest incarceration-rate (percentage of its people in prison) (except for the tiny island of Seychelles) at 693 per 100,000, calls Iran a ‘dictatorship’ which has 287 per 100,000, and calls Russia a ‘dictatorship’ which has 450 per 100,000, and calls China a ‘dictatorship’ which has 164 per 100,000, and calls Syria a ‘dictatorship’ which has 60 per 100,000. Who is the U.S. regime, to call other nations ‘dictatorships’, and to ‘justify’ in this manner, invading them, or even imposing economic sanctions against them? What kind of hypocrisy is that? It’s a kind that’s filled with psychopathy and bloodlust but that leads America, from the very top, regardless of what the American public, below that aristocracy-of-wealth, actually want.
On October 21st, Gareth Porter headlined at Consortium News, “Trump Bows to Neocons — Netanyahu”, and he wrote:
Netanyahu has continued to demand that Trump either withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) [Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran] or make far-reaching changes that he knows are impossible to achieve. In Netanyahu’s Sept. 19 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu declared, “Israel’s policy toward the nuclear deal with Iran is very simple: Change it or cancel it.” And he made no secret of what that meant: If Trump doesn’t “cancel” the deal, he must get rid of its “sunset clause” and demand that Iran end its advanced centrifuges and long-range missile program, among other fundamentally unattainable objectives.
Trump’s statement on Oct. 13 managed to include both of the either/or choices that Netanyahu had given him.
When the Sauds or Israel’s Prime Minister (or especially both, as in “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!”) make a demand upon the American Government, the U.S. leadership adhere to it — not necessarily right away, but the record does show, they adhere to it, sooner or later; and, even after Israel invaded America in 1967, and even after the Sauds invaded America (in an inside job with White House complicity) in 2001, the U.S. leadership continue to do what Israel and the Sauds want.
Afghans didn’t do 9/11. Iraqis didn’t do 9/11. Syrians didn’t do 9/11. Libyans didn’t do 9/11. And, above all (since Al Qaeda doesn’t even allow Shia members), Iran didn’t do 9/11. Russia certainly didn’t do 9/11, either, and was opposed to jihadists even back in 1979 when the U.S. leadership conspired with the Sauds to introduce jihadists into first Afghanistan and then into Russia itself (Chechnya etc.). But, the U.S. aristocracy — the U.S. Government — fined Iran $10.5 billion for having perpetrated 9/11, without a shred of evidence that Iran was even involved in financing or in carrying out, or in any other way, the attacks. And, for Trump, and for the Kushners, and for the Adelsons, and for AIPAC, etc., even that’s not bad enough injustice against Iran, to satisfy them. They want Iranian blood, and they need the ‘news’media to ‘justify’ it, like the ‘news’media ‘justified’ the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for America’s aristocracy.
No wonder why the heads-of-state in Syria, and in Iran, and in Russia, and in China, have higher polled job-approval ratings from their citizenry, than does the head-of-state in America. The American public are being grossly misinformed by ‘our’ ‘news’media, about such things as were, in previous occasions, ‘Saddam’s WMD’, and ‘the tyrant Gaddafi’, and ‘Russia’s dictatorship’, and ‘Syria’s brutal dictator’, and ‘America’s ally Israel’; but, yet, we know enough to be able to figure out that the U.S. Government is profoundly hypocritical and corrupt and violent, and that it doesn’t represent the American people, but instead pretends to, while it actually represents America’s actual enemies, and masters: the billionaires who control America and who control America’s ‘allies’. We’re beginning to figure it out. After the past 27 years of nonstop lies, we’re beginning to understand, that it’s nonstop lies.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.