The warmongers were wrong about Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Now watch them make the same mistake about Iran
Israel is the main source of terror and instability in the Middle East. But the west continually turns away from this reality
As the G7 issues a statement declaring
that Israel has a “right to defend itself”, you have a right to ask if
you are losing your mind. Israel launched an unprovoked onslaught on
Iran. Its excuse – that Tehran may acquire a nuclear weapon – renders
its attack illegal under the UN charter, which forbids wars justified by
the claim of a future threat.
“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” declares the G7 statement. Even though Donald Trump’s intelligence chief testified
three months ago that the US intelligence community “continues to
assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon”. Even though it’s
Israel that actually possesses nuclear weapons,
while refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and
refusing International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. Even though, as
progress was being made in nuclear talks between Iran and the US,
Israel targeted Iran’s chief negotiator and proceeded to exterminate
scientists, including their families, alongside countless other
civilians, including children, an athlete, a teacher, a pilates instructor. Even though Israel’s leader is subject to an arrest warrant,
accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And even though
Israel has erased Gaza in a genocidal frenzy, and subjected the
illegally occupied and colonised West Bank to an escalating pogrom,
attacked southern Lebanon and Beirut, and invaded and occupied Syria. No
country in the Middle East is as great a source of regional instability
and terror as Israel: it’s not even close.
Yet even as polling shows that Britons overwhelmingly want no part
in this literal crime, we hear the same tunes sung to demonise
opponents of the latest carnage. Scottish politicians demanding peace
“are siding with a mediaeval theocratic dictatorship”, declares former flagship
BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. Recall how opponents of the Iraq,
Afghanistan and Libya calamities were monstered as lackeys of Saddam
Hussein, the Taliban and Muammar Gaddafi. Yet who, Mr Neil, was
vindicated – catastrophically so?
Here
is a tragedy paid with the blood of an estimated more than 4.5 million
human souls – the combined number of direct and indirect deaths in the
post-9/11 war zones, according to a Brown University study.
There have been no reputational consequences for those who cheered on
each calamity, allowing them to walk away whistling from each crime
scene demanding yet more violence without shame. About six months before
the Iraq invasion, and believing the war in Afghanistan to already be a
great success, Neil wrote a column warning “the suburbs of Baghdad are
now dotted with secret installations, often posing as hospitals or
schools” which were developing chemical and biological weapons and,
“most sinister of all, a renewed attempt to develop nuclear weapons”.
One
sentence he deployed against advocates of peace should surely become
the epitaph of the warmongers: “It is unclear how many more times they
have to be wrong before we are released from the obligation to take them
too seriously.” Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, shared his hubris, promising US Congress in 2002: “If you take out Saddam – Saddam’s regime – I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
No
amount of objective failure can change their minds. This fanaticism can
only be sustained by mocking reality itself. Unlike Israel, the Iranian regime “targets civilians”, says a prime minister accused of war crimes. At the same time, an Israeli military spokesperson brands Tehran a “terror regime”
because of these killings. The concept of terrorism, in practice, has
come to mean violence perpetrated by regimes and militants hostile to
the west, used to portray such acts as illegitimate and immoral, unlike
the vastly more lethal missiles and bullets of Tel Aviv and Washington.
Israel’s gall is something to behold. It has butchered tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza – mostly women and children – yet 24 Israelis killed by Iranian attacks apparently exposes the unique evil of Tehran’s regime. More than twice as many hungry Palestinians looking for food in Gaza were slaughtered in a single massacre
by Israeli troops overnight: note how this mass killing receives the
tiniest fraction of media attention. There is no attempt to disguise
this hierarchy of death. A comprehensive new report
on the BBC’s reporting of the Gaza genocide finds that each Israeli
fatality received 33 times more coverage than each Palestinian. The
west’s facilitation of Israel’s atrocities relies on treating Arab and
Iranian lives as worthless.
Iran, too, of
course, has a legal responsibility to avoid killing Israeli civilians.
As Kenneth Roth, former Human Rights Watch director, observes:
“Israel’s close intermingling of military and civilian sites makes it
difficult to know what Iran is aiming its missiles at.” In Gaza, this
was defined as using civilians as “human shields”, but no such standards
are applied to Israel. This narrative was used to wipe Gaza from the
face of the Earth, even as Israel used actual Palestinian human shields on an industrial scale.
You
may indeed feel like you are losing your mind. After all, Israel’s
military has reportedly committed every war crime under the sun. It
attacked Iran without evidence or provocation. The same cheerleaders for
past bloodbaths strut around advocating yet more slaughter as though
recent history never happened, while opponents of dropping bombs on
terrified civilians are once more smeared as dangerous extremists. Yet
western states issue a statement portraying the genocidal, expansionist,
nuclear-armed Israeli state as the victim, and our government refuses
to rule out military support for Tel Aviv.
The
truth is you are not losing your mind. The actual mad men are those in
power. And unless they finally face a reckoning, the abyss awaits.