Washington’s ‘regime change’ for Israel
June 26, 2010 ·
“Like so many other crusader states and occupation regimes, the Zionist state will pass from the scene. Israel’s hideous ‘Wall of separation’ cannot protect a regime of terrorists that is detested by the rest of the world,” Christopher Bollyn in Is Israel Doomed?, June 11, 2010.
A few decades ago, the ‘regime change’ was usually carried out by the two superpowers, United States and the USSR. Since the demise of USSR, this burden has fallen on Washington’s shoulders.
Washington has continued its great tradition zealously – bringing regime changes in almost every corner of the world through its intelligence services and their counterparts in the UK, Israel and India – using bribe, assassination and faking ‘pro-democracy protests’. However, Washington did hit a concrete wall, for the time being at least, in some countries, such as, Islamic Republic, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan and Turkey.
Early this month it was reported that Mossad hit men just missed in an attempt to assassinate Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But, I can assure readers that Washington will keep on trying to bring regime changes in Tehran, Ankara and Khartoum, no matter how much it cost to US taxpayers – to please its masters in Tel Aviv. Israel’s famous columnist, Uri Avnery, has confirmed this fact when he wrote: “AIPAC continue to strike fear into Washington’s hearts, Congress will continue to dance to its tune. But when the new generation comes to man key positions, the support for Israel will erode, American politicians would stop crawling on their bellies and the US administration will gradually change its relations us (the begining of regime change in the Zionist entity)”.
America’s famous Jewish investigating reporter, Seymour Hersh, had reported that George Bush had allocated US$400 million to bring a regime change in Tehran in late 2007.
Professor William O. Beeman (University of Minnesota) in his recent article, titled The Regime Change in Iran: The Fantasy That Will Not Die, wrote:
The government of Israel has succeeded in creating a codicil – also right out of the Cold War: “What threatens Israel also threatens the United States.”
The answers are Cold War answers. No imagination. No attempt to understand Iran in social, cultural or historical terms. Just a repeat of what “worked” to bring down the Soviet Union short of direct attack: isolation, inflicting economic pain, scaring the world into thinking “the enemy” is dangerous, and finally fomenting and encouraging internal dissent.
The reason this rhetoric works is because the U.S. public and perhaps many Europeans are already primed to accept both this logic and these solutions having been taught to fear the Soviet Union for three decades. However these stratagems won’t work with Iran. Iran is not the Soviet Union. Iran sees itself not as the aggressor, but rather the defender.
All of these strategies have thus far failed.
Isolation of Iran is not working. At a recent conference on the Middle East in London, a leading Italian economist said: “We are Iran’s largest European trade partner. When our businessmen show up in Tehran, there are three Chinese businessmen waiting in the outer office. The U.S. is driving Iran into the hands of Asian partners, and ruining our business with them – and for what? To satisfy some American ideology?” The only nation that truly desires Iranian isolation and believes that it can be achieved is the United States.
Inflicting economic pain is not only ineffective, it is counter-productive. We may have brought the Soviet Union down by creating an arms race that they couldn’t sustain, but nothing we have or could do to Iran is going to cripple the country to the point of collapse, and it is laughable to think that that could happen. The Iranian people are inconvenienced by these low-level unilateral economic sanctions, such as those pushed through the United Nations Security Council on June 9, 2010, and the U.S. Treasury on June 16. They thus are embittered about the United States, but nothing more. It most decidedly does not make U.S. overtures to them to overthrow their own government more probable.
Scaring the world about Iran has been a complete failure outside of the United States. No one has any proof whatever that Iran has a nuclear weapons program – it is a red herring, and the world knows it. The Non-aligned Movement has continually issued support for Iran’s nuclear energy program. Even if there were a nuclear military program, Iran is years away from having anything that could pass for an effective weapon. The Gulf States may be concerned, as they always have been, about the Shi’a community, since they constitute either a majority (Bahrain) or a significant minority (UAE, Saudi Arabia), but the dead-end idea promulgated by the Bush administration and carrying forward, that Iran is about to attack its neighbors – and with a non-existent nuclear warhead – is the stuff of fiction. Iran would destroy its own economy if it did this. Its relations with its neighbors are completely symbiotic.
Finally, Cornyn and Brownback, Ackerman, Gerecht, and others of their ilk utterly misunderstand the post-1999-election Green Movement in Iran. If the movement is eventually successful, it will not usher in some kind of purging revolution that will create a pro-American government. The Green Movement is about legitimacy of leadership within the current Iranian governmental framework, not about overthrowing the government. Nor will trying to foment dissent in Iran’s many ethnic communities, another strategy favored by the regime-change fans, be any more effective. The many ethnic groups that make up Iran’s pluralistic civilization have identified with Great Iranian civilization for more than two millennia.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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