Iran: Operation Ayatollah

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Go and do a news search on Iran at yahoo or google or whatever to
see more. I randomly selected this one from the Toronto Star.

Sabri

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War on Iran has sequel potential
Toronto Star, Jun. 1, 2003

The May ratings sweeps are over, summer is almost here and more
than half the programming on network TV is a rerun.

Because reruns don't pull in the eyeballs they used to, last week
the U.S. networks announced some 20 new reality series. As
previous summer hits, from Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to
American Idol, taught the network lemmings, it's an excellent
season for fake truth.

Believe it or not, this has everything to do with the upcoming
Operation Ayatollah They Had It Coming, or whatever the White
House sloganeers will dub their war on Iran.

Let's use the ever-popular Survivor as an example, shall we?

An attack on Iran will be a rerun of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but
not quite.

Like successive editions of Survivor, it will boast a different
location and tribes (at least on one side) but with the same
producer (U.S. President George W. Bush) and host (Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

A war on Iran will, just like the Iraq series, be presented as
actual reality but, like Survivor, it will be edited for TV.

This means we won't see the gruesome stuff that happens in war ?
you know, like dead people. I won't dwell on the icky aspects of
Survivor except to wonder: Where in the Amazon do you hang the
toilet paper?

Operation Ayatollah will have its villains but they won't be as
memorable as the one in the original: brutal vicious dictator
Saddam Hussein.

I mean, has anybody ever out-eviled Richard Hatch, the corpulent
corporate trainer who won the first edition of Survivor? Somehow,
anonymous ayatollahs can't cut it.

The next war is already getting heavy advance promotion.

CNN has a graphic going "Inside Iran," and Wolf Blitzer has been
braying about how Iran may have weapons of mass destruction,
could be supporting Hezbollah terrorists and, of course, has
connections to ever-elusive Al Qaeda. Friday afternoon, he
allowed one of the usual suspects from the Heritage Foundation ?
don't you love how these right-wing think tanks are named? ? to
call Iran the "poster child for axis of evil."

Then political analyst William Schneider talked on CNN about
Iran's "dangerous nuclear ambitions" and its "subjugation of
women." But he uttered nary a word about how in Iraq, where women
had far more freedoms, they're now terrified of marauders whom
the U.S. occupation forces can't seem to control ? as well as of
how the radical Muslim mullahs are curtailing their post-war
liberties.

Iraq has become to the U.S. something like what Gaza is to
Israel, a dangerous and hostile occupied territory. Anarchy
rules, basic services are still in short supply, and while the
coalition may have won the war, it's far from winning the peace.
One month after Bush, in his Top Gun outfit, announced the
hostilities were over, American boys in uniform are still dying,
at the rate of almost one a day.

But you wouldn't know it from following most U.S. TV news. The
embedded reporters are back stateside, dining out on their war
stories, while the networks are cutting back on their foreign
coverage ... again.

In the next war, we can expect another bunch of clueless
journalists to run amok not knowing any geography, history or
anything about where they are.

Here we go again, kids.

What's more, even as a few of the mainstream media slowly
excavate the mountain of lies upon which the Bush administration
sold its war on Iraq, most are scrambling for seats on the
Re-elect Bush In 2004 campaign bus.

Topping that pile of lies is, of course, the whopper about
weapons of mass destruction. (If you want to see a fascinating
autopsy of this one, check Bill Mon's blog at
billmon.org.v.sabren.com/archives/000172.html)

Why WMDs? As U.S. deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz told
Vanity Fair this month, it was the casus belli that "for
bureaucratic reasons" was "the one reason everyone could agree
on."

It was also the easiest to market. The administration managed to
exploit Americans' post- 9/11 anxieties about anthrax, dirty
bombs and the like, thanks to a compliant media ready to hype
terror alerts while giving hours of free and unchallenged airtime
to the liars and their lies.

This explains why, according to the Program on International
Policy Attitudes (http://www.pipa.org), 60 per cent of Americans
believe the nuke-u-lar threat was a good reason to go to war and
41 per cent believe, or are not sure, that WMDs were actually
discovered in Iraq.

For the Bushies, it's going brilliantly. According to the same
PIPA survey, 74 per cent give the president "high marks for his
leadership."

It's just like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman suggested on
Friday: The White House is following the script as presented in
Barry Levinson's prescient 1997 "satire'' Wag The Dog. In order
to ensure their re-election, and divert attention from domestic
catastrophes such as a burgeoning deficit and rising
unemployment, the Republicans in power are gearing up for another
war.

"You want to win this election, you better change the subject,"
Krugman quotes Robert De Niro's political fixer character in Wag
The Dog. "You wanna change this subject, you better have a war."

"It's show business."