Updated November 13, 2007
There's nothing like a friendly dialogue to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you're dealing with state-sponsored terrorists.
That seems to be the message of MoveOn.org, Code Pink, and our other friends in the progressive movement these days. (The two groups, by the way, are headquartered here in the Bay Area.) Even Hillary Clinton had to back off the ayatollahs, after voting for a seemingly straightforward resolution to put the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the terrorist list. The left And Barack Obama accused her of pandering to the Bush Administration's perpetual war machine.
One can almost see Rod Serling standing just offstage, talking about us. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has directed the kidnapping, rape, mutilation and murder of women all over Iraq by Islamic militants, a situation that's getting worse now that the Brits have pulled out of Basra in the south, near the Iranian border. One would think the all-woman Code Pink might have brought this up the last time they camped out on Speaker Pelosi's lawn.
Instead, the New York based Iranian Women's Alliance recently recently accused Medea Benjamin's organization of photoshopping a JPEG snapshot of a protest in Iran against the ayatollahs. The photo was doctored to look like the women were protesting against the United States, then placed on Code Pink's website. The picture was eventually removed.
It's an unsettling revelation. Back in the 1980s, we peace and human rights protestors used to be able to distinguish between a Contra mercenary funded by the CIA and a legitimate resistance fighter. Of course, we read a lot in those days, talked to the people who were under fire, and sorted out where all the self-described political analysts were getting their paychecks from.
But no more. The historical record and proximity groups simply don't rate anymore like a Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker. If Hersh’s anonymous sources and retired admirals say we’re about to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, then it must be so. The left reasons that all the saber-rattling towards Iran is the Bush Administration’s way of preparing us for another invasion. After all, that's how he paved the way for the Iraq invasion. And even though that entire strategy has since been debunked as a pack of lies, the peace movement is convinced that the Pentagon and Karl Rove are too stupid to try a different tack this time.
It doesn't seemed to have occurred to the activists that maybe someone is trying to set them up. After all, we're talking about the same fundamentalist regime responsible for putting the Reagan/Bush Administration in office in the first place. It was back in 1979 when that little embassy hostage crisis transpired, the one nowadays referred to as Carter’s October Surprise. Set in motion by Henry Kissinger, by the time the dust cleared, Carter had lost what should have been an easy re-election, Ronald Reagan took over as President, and the people of Iran saw one grisly U.S. backed dictator replaced by another. By late 1980, the covert missile sales program was underway, eventually exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Now, if the Bush Administration was truly interested in regime change in Iran, why did the Pentagon cover for President Ahmadenijad when two former embassy hostages fingered him in 2005 as the student leader who ran that operation? It was the perfect opportunity to garner support from the American public to attack Iran. That's not what happened. "A case of mistaken identity," a Pentagon spokesman declared, ignoring the testimony of two former military advisers interrogated by Ahmadenijad over the course of their 444 days in captivity. There were even photographs to back up the claim.
Yet the matter was swept under the rug.
Here's another riddle to chew on: If an attack on Iran were imminent, as Hersh has suggested, does anybody honestly think President Ahmadenijad would go right on bragging about his country's alleged nuclear arsenal the way he does? The man may be off-the-wall, but the ayatollahs who control him are not. More than likely, they already know that the rhetorical posturing by the Bush/Cheney cabal is more about throwing the posse off the trail, not onto it. After all, ever since the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health released its staggering death tally in Iraq last year, citing 655,000 dead, there must surely have been concern that a war crimes tribunal might be formed.
In place of that logical next step, we have this bizarre peace campaign urging dialog and "cultural exchanges" with Iran. Perhaps it's simply indicative of how far down an Orwellian drainpipe the public discourse has gone on this issue.
Talking to Iran’s government is like sitting down to tea with Timothy McVeigh. It serves no purpose other than to distract people from discussing the accountability of war criminals. While MoveOn.org and Code Pink have been busy snookering their rank and file from coast to coast, the Pentagon continues to softpeddle the ayatollahs as they have always done behind the scenes. In early November, several of the the Quds Force Leaders captured by U.S. forces last winter were released. As we explained in a previous editorial (PDF file), those men were responsible for coordinating the death squad killings, IED attacks against coalition forces and other henious crimes againsts civilians. Their release makes a mockery of the War on Terrorism.
The President may say Iran lies on the Axis of Evil, but it turns out he’s said a lot of things he doesn’t really mean. Instead of buying $100,000 ads reacting against the alleged plot to nuke Iran, MoveOn.org's money should be spent lobbying the U.S. State Department to support the Iranian Women's Alliance and other secular opposition groups fighting to overthrow the Islamic dictatorship.
It appears the progressive moment, like the people of Troy, have a weakness for quadrapeds made of wood.
Copyright 2007 TheCityEdition.com