Headlines : "War on Terror"

Iran's Dire Threat

Summary:

Everyone’s talking about Iran. Even liberals like Paul Berman (War and Terrorism) and anarchists like Chomsky chum Edward Herman. But with good reason: the neocon crosshairs are planted firmly on her borders and the propaganda machine is in full motor, churning out fearful odes to the nascent nuclear potential of the Iranian fundamentalists.

[Posted By silverback]

By Edward S. Herman
Republished from Z Magazine (October 2004)

It might be able to defend itself

Iran is the next U.S. and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran’s alleged menace and refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure Orwell—that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the possibility of self-defense.

You might have thought that after the retrospectively awkward and embarrassing media service to Bush’s lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and dire threat to U.S. national security, which greased the skids to the invasion/occupation of Iraq, that the media would be less prone to jump uncritically on war propaganda bandwagons. But you would be wrong. It is a pretty reliable law of media performance that whenever the state targets an enemy, the media will get on the bandwagon enthusiastically or, at minimum, allow themselves to be mobilized as agents of propaganda and disinformation. Given the power of the United States and the extreme weakness of its usual targets, the claims of the fearsome threat posed by the targets is always comical. My favorite remains Guatemala in the early 1950s, when the National Security Council claimed that… Click here to read the rest of the article

Posted by silverback
Co-founder of GNN. Music video and feature film director. Co-author of "True Lies." Director/shooter of "BattleGround." Arrested at the RNC shooting first narrative feature "This Revolution." New projects: A book, "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: The New...