In the wake of the brazen U.S. assassination of Iran's leading general, Qassem Soleimani, a hero of the Iraq-Iran war and head of the so-called Qods Force, by a missile strike from a drone attack on an international airport located in a sovereign nation and putative U.S. ally (the client state of Iraq, conquered and subjugated on the orders of U.S. emperor George W. Bush in 2003), now is a good time to review the outstanding U.S. demands against Iran. [U.S. media are spelling it Qassem, the BBC and Wikipedia, have Qasem.]
Trump's handpicked Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has a list of 12 outstanding demands against Iran. These are preconditions to the U.S. deigning to even TALK to Iran about the U.S. ceasing its relentless economic warfare against that country. This warfare is euphemistically called "economic sanctions." In fact they are total warfare, barring Iran from the international banking system (a system controlled by the U.S.- with the rest of the world's nations supinely acceding to this financial hegemony by the U.S.), and including the publicly stated goal of preventing Iran from selling ANY oil whatsoever outside its borders. Again, the other 200 or so allegedly sovereign nations of the world, including large, powerful ones like China, have all knuckled under to U.S.
diktat and ceased buying oil from Iran, at least openly. If this isn't global domination, I don't know what is.
Under the "principle" that
it is criminal to go against U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. government ordered Canada to arrest a top executive of China's premiere high tech company, Huawei, for violating U.S. anti-Iran sanctions- i.e. not participating in the U.S. economic war on Iran. Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and the daughter of the company boss, was tracked by the U.S. global secret police surveillance system as she flew to Canada, where she was held at the airport, her luggage "searched" for 3 hours without explanation, and then was arrested on a U.S. extradition "request." (Really an order. Canada is a virtual satrapy of the U.S.) Her alleged "crime" is violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. You see, if the U.S. decides to wage economic warfare against another country, it demands that
all the other nations in the world participate in that war. In other words, the U.S. dictates foreign policy for all other nations. And lacking political or moral integrity, those nations make themselves U.S. lackeys and obey. Because they refuse to resist U.S. power, even though collectively they obviously could do so. (Even in some cases individually, as China could.)
Oh, and the U.S. applies its laws not just within its own borders, but over the entire planet earth. That's how Meng Wanzhou could be "guilty" of breaking U.S. law while OUTSIDE the U.S.
Meng has been held in Canada for over a year as Canada is the rope in a tug of war between China and the U.S. Canada allowed her out of jail but confined to Canada after China retaliated against Canada by jailing a couple of Canadian citizens. (Labeled "hostages" by the U.S. propaganda system.)
I should mention so as not to be misunderstood: I am NOT a supporter of the Iranian theocracy. As a lifelong atheist, democrat, and pro-human rights person, I have no truck with that regime. But contrary to its self-deluding propaganda, the U.S. is the opposite of a paragon of virtue. It is one of history's most aggressive empires which has committed innumerable atrocities and crimes against humanity through its history, starting with its foundational principles, genocide and slavery. Moreover this is not about taking sides. As always, I strive for the objectivity that is sorely lacking in most public commentary, most people's minds, and certainly in propaganda.
I call these demands "Hitlerian" because of their extremism, and because the target of the demands would find them virtually impossible to accept. Hitler made such demands with a deliberate goal of having an excuse for war when his demands were rejected. Trump claims not to want war with Iran, but he has surrounded himself with a coterie of imperialist fanatics who DO want war with Iran, such as the recently-cashiered John Bolton. It's been reported that Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani
Here now are the Trump-Pompeo Demands On Iran. To call them "sweeping" is a gross understatement. Notice that eleven of the twelve begin with the words "Iran must." "Must" is a demand word.
In perpetuity! I guess that means until the end of time.
I'll just note in passing that the U.S. has thousands of nuclear weapons, and Israel has hundreds. Also even the CIA concluded that Iran was NOT trying to build nuclear weapons. However I believe they wanted to have the option to create them if they felt it necessary at some future point. Otherwise it makes no sense to incur the huge expense of money and energy to building underground facilities deep under mountains to prevent Israel from blowing them up (as Israel blew up atomic reactors in Iraq and Syria) with thousands of centrifuges, just to enrich uranium which it could easily purchase from Russia, for example.
By the way, Iran only ever enriched to 20%. allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). For bomb-making purposes, uranium has to be enriched to 90% or more. Under the agreement Iran on one side and the Obama
regime, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and China on the other, Iran turned over virtually all its enriched uranium, mothballed its centrifuges used for enrichment, and agreed to intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Trump tore up the agreement and reimposed sanctions, with the avowed aimed of strangling the Iranian economy to force Iran to make a new deal with Trump. (Imperialist thugs like John Bolton and perhaps Michael Pompeo also wanted the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime in response to this foreign attack on their country and their lives. It's a strategy the U.S. is also using against Venezuela, making people's lives miserable to destabilize an unwanted government, has used against Cuba since 1959, that Nixon used against Chile from 1970-73 when he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to "make the economy scream," and in other places at other times.)
Even though Iran is entitled under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty to enrich uranium to the 20% level, as I mentioned.
Meaning U.S. spies will gain access to every single military base, command and control center, etc.
Just as they did during the UN inspection regime inside Iraq after the first Gulf War of 1991.
We know this from a leading member of that team, former U.S. Marine Major Scott Ritter.
Iran isn't allowed to have missiles. Just its enemies can: Israel, Saudi Arabia,
and the U.S.A. That's reasonable. Why wouldn't Iran agree to THAT?
Including all enemy spies. Because some of those prisoners certainly are. Meanwhile the U.S. will continue to imprison
Iranians for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, "espionage," and whatever, and keep those now in prison locked up.
Because anyone who resists Israeli oppression is a "terrorist." Iran must surrender the region to Israeli hegemony. And of course the U.S. is free to continue aiding Israel in every possible way, as an accomplice to the oppression of the Palestinians and the periodic destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure. And the U.S. can support any actual terrorists it likes, such as the anti-Iranian MEK. And Israel can keep assassinating Iran's nuclear scientists, if it so chooses.
That actually would be a good thing. Those militias have in the past few months slaughtered hundreds of protesters against the corrupt and venal Iraqi "government," and wounded thousands. They have also "disappeared" some, U.S.-death-squad style.
Now if only the U.S. would respect Iraq's sovereignty. After murdering Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and eight others right in the Baghdad, Iraq, airport, the Iraqi legislature voted to kick out the thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Trump himself responded with contempt. There's also a couple of hundred other nations whose sovereignty the U.S. regularly tramples.
The Houthi tribesmen overthrew the very weak "government" of Yemen starting in 2014. The Saudis decided this internal Yemeni power struggle was their business, and picked the overthrown president as their choice to rule Yemen. So for years, to place their chosen puppet back in his seat,w the U.S. and Saudi Arabia (and the UAE until very recently) have waged a relentless war against Yemen, committing war crimes on a daily basis, bombing mosques, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, and so on, instituting a naval blockade, causing a massive cholera epidemic, and a famine. The Obama regime participated in this criminal enterprise, not only selling all the bombs and missiles used to attack Yemen- the Saudis and Emiratis already owned the U.S.-made warplanes they needed, and the U.S. trains their pilots- but even providing targeting information and having U.S. Air Force aerial tankers refuel the Saudis planes on their attack missions. Obama sold tens of billions of arms to the Saudis, and Trump tried to outdo Obama in evil with more arms sales. "Great" Britain, with a hunger for blood money, has also sold significant quantities of weapons to the Saudi "royals" for their war on Yemen.
Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. Thus we see the ubiquitous pattern of the U.S. waging class warfare on a global scale against the world's poor.
Yemeni enemy of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia gets what he has coming.
The UN has determined that a Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from hunger or disease
caused by the Saudi-U.S.-UK-UAE war on Yemen. They probably deserve it.
They might grow up to be "terrorists."
By bombing this schoolbus, the valiant Saudi allies of the U.S. took out 40 terrorist school children, along with eleven adults (who by definition were terrorists because U.S. bombs killed them). The Saudis couldn't have done it without the U.S. Thank you, Obama Trump U.S. Congress!
Multiply this by one million or so, and you have the history of the U.S. Now do you understand why it is undeniable that the U.S. Government is a criminal enterprise? It is only because your mind is marinated in a sea of propaganda that you don't see it, feel it, know it.
Now let's return to those oh-so-reasonable and justified demands that Pompeo-Trump have pending against Iran:
This demand is actually morally sound. Iran is helping the vile Assad dictatorship crush the rebellion of the Syrian people by wholesale slaughter, systematic bombing of medical facilities, torture and atrocities on a massive scale. Of course it isn't morality that motivates this demand, nor concern for the Syrian people, but motives needn't be pure for an action or demand to be a good thing.
This one sure is ironic. When the Taliban fanatics ruled Afghanistan, they murdered a group of Iranian diplomats. The Taliban were only in power at all thanks to the U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi buildup of the most medieval, reactionary forces in Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. The Soviets were lured into invading by President Jimmy Carter's sinister righthand man, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole with a tremendous lifelong hatred of Russians. Years later Brzezinski made a slip and boasted to a French newspaper about how he suckered the Soviets into invading. Just a few months before the 1979 invasion, Brzezinski, the head of the U.S. National Security Council, which coordinates the operations of the U.S. military, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA and other "intelligence agencies," had nothing more important to do than to fly into Afghanistan, a desolate backwater. Hmmm! [1]
When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Iran actually helped the U.S. cause. Then emperor George W. Bush fabricated an "Axis of Evil" in an infamous speech, pretending that Iran, Iraq (then still ruled by Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran with U.S. connivance, used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, caused hundreds of thousands of Iranian casualties and war invalids, and hated by Iran), and North Korea (sic!) were in a World War II-style alliance like the fascist Axis powers Nazi Germany, Italy, and Imperial Japan. Crude and mendacious propaganda, it put Iran on notice that it was an Official Enemy of the U.S.
Now that the U.S. has embedded itself in Afghanistan, and wages constant attacks on Iran, it wouldn't surprise me if Iran's attitude towards the Taliban has changed. But if the U.S. wants to look for nations to blame for propping up the Taliban, I'd suggest they start with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
But the U.S., under whatever president, is apparently too dishonest, too greedy, and too morally cowardly, to do that.
Presumably including domestic ops inside Iran. Hey, I have a suggestion: end the operations of U.S. "Special Forces" inside the scores of countries they currently operate in!
This one reeks to high heaven with the stench of hypocrisy.
Israel regularly bombs Iranian targets inside Syria with impunity. It has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists inside Iran. Saudi Arabia treats Iran as the Devil Incarnate. The U.S. of course has been effectively at war with Iran since the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-imposed dictator the "Shah" (King). The Iranian "threat" consists of its growing influence in the region, which the U.S. and its partners find objectionable.
It's interesting that the demand here is for Iran to end its "threats" against shipping, NOT attacks against shipping. Previously the U.S. made a big stink about the simultaneous attacks on both a Norwegian and a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, which the U.S. government and corporate media parrots shrilly blamed on Iran. It has been definitively proven that Iran DIDN'T commit those attacks, which were probably U.S. operations. [2]
Finally cyber attacks. I have no idea what specifically Pompeo is referring to, if anything. He and Trump- indeed U.S. apparatchiks and politicians generally- often spout baseless rhetoric. Certainly Iran's cyber capabilities are a tiny fraction of the U.S.' And it must be exasperatingly galling for the U.S. to make such a charge, given the relentless U.S. cyber attacks on Iran, including the unleashing of the Stuxnet malware (and others) which targeted Iran's nuclear centrifuges for destruction. (Obama was really proud of that one.)
Again, as usual in the demented world of U.S. political ideology, reality is stood on its head. This is not a defense of Iran. It is looking at the objective facts, nothing more.
Pompeo is a political creation of the greedy, thieving, reactionary billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David. (One of them just died. Hopefully the other one will follow him to the grave soon.) They got Pompeo elected to the U.S. Congress from Kansas, the Kochs' base. Pompeo is a former army officer and rabid, violent imperialist who went on television to call for the execution of Edward Snowden, whose "crime" was revealing the fact that the NSA conducts a program of total surveillance over the entire U.S. population. See "
Pompeo wants to execute Snowden."
Ice water ran in the veins of the late "Dr." Brzezinski. He sneers that the fate of the Afghan people has no more weight than the death of a fly compared to the great benefit of weakening the Soviet Union. Of course the Afghans didn't get a vote on that. So much for U.S. devotion to "democracy" and "human rights."
Graphics used in this essay by RT network.
