FABRICATING THE PRETEXT FOR ANOTHER WAR
By John V. Walsh

CounterPunch, CA
Oct 1 2007

Ahmadinejad is Not My Enemy

I had any number of Yossarian moments this last week as the entire
apparatus of respectable opinion unleashed everything they had at
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. But what has Ahmadinejad done
to me or anyone in the U.S.? Nothing that I know of.

On the other hand Israel and its Lobby, whose hand was very much
in evidence at the Columbia demonstrations against Ahmadinejad, is
very much my enemy. Along with the industrial/Congressional wing
of the military industrial Congressional complex, Israel and its
fifth column in the U.S. (aka the Lobby) drove us into war in Iraq,
killing thousands of American soldiers and 1 million Iraqis. So there
is the Yossarian moment. Ahmadinejad is not trying to get Americans
killed, but these other guys sure are–and they have been remarkably
successful. So who is our Colonel Cathcart, the commanding officer in
Catch-22 trying to drive Yossarian into ever more life-threatening
missions? Not Ahmadinejad, that’s for sure. (It is striking that
Bush and the Democratic Congress are literally latter day Cathcarts,
cruelly extending the length of combat missions and multiplying them
endlessly based on fine print. Catch-22 is not lost on our rulers.)

And now the Lobby and its allies want to kill Iranians too. In fact
they would like to destroy Iran, its army and its infrastructure.

Why? Because Iran wants nuclear power? That is hardly believable. At
that rate we should be pouring into the streets the next time Sarkozy
who presides over a densely nuclear France bares his chest in the
U.S. again. And if Iran has nuclear power, so what?

Now do not tell me, as radicals (of both Libertarian and Leftist
stripe) are being duly advised by liberals these days, that we are
making the classical mistake of identifying the enemy of my enemies
as my friend. For I am not saying that Ahmadinejad is my friend. In
fact I know very little about the man–except what I hear through the
filters of pundocratic respectability and the spin put on his words by
the chorus of neocons. He apparently feels that historical Palestine
should have room for Arabs and Jews both, as Iran apparently does. That
is fine with me. A modern secular state for Arabs and Jews together
in historic Palestine is inevitable in the long term anyway, so why
not get on with it? (I would differ with Ahmadinejad that Iran should
remain an Islamic state and I would like to tell him so. But I find
that those who would argue for a Jewish state, or more accurately a
Jewish apartheid state, are on thin ice when arguing this point with
my non-enemy Ahmadinejad.) He says he wants to study the Holocaust
more–and he may even be a genocide denier. But so what? Freedom to
discuss things should be open ended.

And Abe Foxman and company deny the Armenian genocide, but their
praises are sung far and wide, high and low. So Ahmadinejad may not
be my friend–but he is not my enemy.

Nor is Iran my enemy–although the U.S. owes Iran a mighty big set
of apologies, and Iran should certainly consider our government a
power hostile to it. For consider what has been done to Iran with
our tax dollars. "Our" CIA overthrew the democratically elected
Iranian government of Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1950s because his
social democratic party wanted Iran to control Iranian oil–in place
of Anglo/American corporations. The U.S. installed the Shah and with
the aid of Israel, according to Uri Avnery, trained his vicious secret
police who tortured and killed untold numbers of Iranians to maintain
his pro-U.S. rule. Then when the Shah was ousted, we supported Saddam
Hussein in his vicious war on Iran with chemical weapons. A million
people died in that war. Oh, the Iranians did hold a handful of
Americans hostage at the time they overthrew our puppet, the Shah,
certainly a hostile act but a pin prick compared to the death and
destruction we and our Israeli ally have visited on Iran and plan to
do again.

So I am really not impressed by the forces arrayed against Ahmadinejad
at Columbia and in the neocon "think" tanks. From William Kristol
to Michael Lerner (who has also gone after those in the wonderful
Jewish Voice for Peace who advocate a one-state solution), they were
all attacking the Iranian Pres and Iran itself last week.

But the Iranians have not tried to kill Americans–in fact for hundreds
of years they have a pretty good record of staying at home, avoiding
aggression and defending themselves. They may have a thing or two to
teach us on that score. Perhaps Ahmadinejad is right when he says he
is just a teacher.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com