Middle East Eye
Once upon a time, the United States launched a war on Iraq with the help of false allegations of WMD.
The corporate media - and most memorably the US newspaper of record, the New York Times -thrust itself onto the PR frontlines by presenting as reality the unhinged claims of the George W Bush administration.
Now, more than 16 years and an obscene quantity of Iraqi deaths later, it seems we may be witnessing a repeat performance of the same old media tricks, this time targeting Iran - although at least Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has not yet decreed that the Iranians be made to “suck on this”.
First off, of course, there’s the ongoing nuclear hysteria, which apparently can’t be put to rest no matter how many times we review the facts.
As Mehdi Hasan points out over at The Intercept, theTimes report of 13 May on US visions of “sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons” fails to answer a simple question: “How can the Iranians 'accelerate work' on weapons that do not exist?”
Then there’s that Times editorial cartoon, published the same day with the title “Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?" and featuring a caricature of the Ayatollah Khamenei retrieving a "nuclear programme" from his kitchen freezer.
A helpful correction published three days later notes that “[a]n earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has not produced highly enriched uranium”.
But selective retroactive fact-checking can hardly reverse a tsunami of radioactive propaganda.
Nor does the US media, in its quest to paint Iran as a violent aggressor, generally care to provide relevant history re: US violence vis-à-vis Iran- like the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, which enabled the long-term rule by terror of the torture-happy shah, dedicated customer of the US arms industry.
And guess what: the shah’s reign also saw intense US efforts in support of a nuclear Iran.
The recent reported sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates - the timing of which seems rather suspiciously convenient - has meanwhile offered anonymous US officials exciting new opportunities to point the finger at Iran in the press.
See, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s announcement that "U.S. Says Iran Likely Behind Ship Attacks”, in which “a U.S. official” is credited with relaying this most explosive “finding”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
