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Howard Epstein – DID A US JOURNALIST REALLY ASK “IS IRAN REALLY SO EVIL”?

The tortuous punctuation in the title above is a fitting opener for consideration of the mind-set of US journalist Stephen Kinzer, formerly of the New York Times, and now at Brown University, and his fellow-travellers on the Left who see the running down of the West as their life’s work. Writing in the Wall Street Journal of 18 January 2016[1], after his questioning title, Kinzer asserted:

“The demonization of Iran is arguably the most bizarre and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,” and “Americans view Iran not simply as a country with interests that sometimes conflict with ours but as a relentless font of evil.”

 

Perhaps Mr Kinzer seeks to out-satirise the great British satirist, Noel Coward, who in 1943 skewered the Germans thus:-

 

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

When our victory is ultimately won,

It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight,

And their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite.

Let’s be meek to them,

And turn the other cheek to them

And try to bring out their latent sense of fun.

Let’s give them full air parity,

And treat the rats with charity,

But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.

 

Well, Mr Kinzer, do tell: which Americans did you identify as being beastly to, and demonising, Iran? Surely not those who have empowered Iran with a road map to a nuclear weapon, sooner or later (my money is not on the latter), and went on further to empower Iran with the release of some $100 billion, the better to fund Hezbollah and to fight its proxy wars with Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the Syria/Iraq theatre. Surely not. Yet, since those are the only Americans who could have lawfully been dealing with Iran until the new deal (one rather less beneficent than the Roosevelt version), the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed, he must indeed mean the negotiating team led by Wendy Sherman. Yes, that’s right; she who so expertly negotiated away the threat of the nuclear programme of those demons, the North Koreans, was given a second opportunity to excel at protecting American interests.

 

Perhaps Mr Kinzer can tell us whether, when negotiating with Iran, Ms Sherman acted as though she demonized it when she cleared the way for the Iranians to humiliate the United States, by exacting craven capitulation to whatever they wanted? They got all this whilst being demonized? What more might they have obtained had they not been demonized? Perhaps ace-negotiator Sherman would have allowed them the bomb, and the money too, immediately.

 

Just as the US now lives in fear that one day Kim will make good on his threat to create a hydrogen bomb (claimed by him as a reality ten days ago, but possibly prematurely), so too will it soon realize that the pact (the JCPOA) it has just signed with another demon (Iran), is again one that the US has rendered itself powerless to enforce, now that it has allowed itself to be squeezed out of the Middle East (to which I shall soon turn). The snapback provisions? They will be ignored[2], just like Obama ignored his self-declared redline over Assad using WMD to gas his own people in Syria. Let us see what another journalist, Michael A Wilner, Jerusalem Post (JP) Correspondent in Washington, wrote about that in the JP just this weekend:-

 

“a single slip of the tongue from the president …. when he said the movement or use of chemical weapons would be a “redline” for action from the United States. We all remember this moment. He didn’t specify whether that meant military action, or what sort of military action; but the use of the term “redline”…. It was ultimately a rhetorical mistake – the president didn’t mean to say it – that led US allies and political opponents to set upon the president a standard he never intended to set for himself. Holding the president to that remark meant, on a practical level, that anything shy of military strikes was going to be interpreted as weakness.” [Did you notice that? “US allies and political opponents … set upon the president a standard he never intended to set for himself.” What sort of mind comes out with a comment like that?]

 

Well, Mr Wilner, welcome to the death-throes of Pax Americana, for they surely began with that “slip of the tongue”. Do tell, was it for that sort of presidential conduct that Obama was pre-emptively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

 

What emanated from the non-redline non-event, was that the USA left a vacuum in the Middle-East, which Russia took no time at all to fill, with fighter-bombers permanently stationed in Syria conducting daily bombing sorties that (according to Al-Jazeera) have killed a thousand civilians in a few weeks of aerial activity (as yet, no demonstrations on the streets of London to report), and a huge display of naval power off the coast of Lebanon in the past week. Is this what the projection of American soft power under Obama looks like? One wonders whether he and Kerry are proud of what they have done.

 

They are not alone in the poverty of their decisions. Poor American choices in the field of diplomacy and foreign policy are not new. They have a long and sorry record in that department. At the end of WWII, Truman ignored eight letters from Ho Chi Minh, making him an implacable enemy and setting the scene for the Vietnam War. Eisenhower abandoned Batista in 1959, when Castro landed in Cuba – and for good measure, he preferred a golf day over a meeting with Castro in DC, the first step in pushing the nationalist, non-communist Castro into the arms of the Soviets, almost provoking WWIII over the missile sites that the Russians soon began installing in Cuba.

 

In 1978, Jimmy Carter, lacking any antennae, lauded the deeply-unpopular Shah of Iran at two state dinners, the second in Tehran, in the face of the impoverished Iranian masses. They were thereby prompted to take to the streets in protest and Carter, always the dullard, thereupon abandoned the Shah who fled Iran (for Cairo); but Carter, still the dullard, Carter admitted the Shah into the USA when in 1979 he sought medical attention in New York. It was this that enraged the Islamic students, leading directly to the hostage crisis in which 52 US diplomats were kept in captivity for 444 days, a military rescue attempt having been bungled on the way – several humiliating traumas for the whole American nation served up by Carter.

 

In more recent times, continuing the poverty-stricken record, Obama threw Gaddafi of Libya to the wolves, thereby ensuring that no other world leader would, as Gaddafi had, voluntarily abandon WMD. Next, Obama went on to allow Mubarak, the US’s most important ally in the Middle East, to be deposed, before downgrading a WMD redline in Syria to (as Wilner would have it) “a slip of the tongue, a rhetorical mistake [and] something the President didn’t mean to say”.

 

We are not finished yet with this litany of disastrous choices. In doing a deal with the Iranian devil – there Mr Kinzer: I have nailed my colours to the mast – the US abandoned Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, empowered Iran, and set them on a collision course with results that are bound to tarnish Obama’s much-desired laudatory presidential legacy.

 

What hope then for support, when it is needed, for the last remaining US friend in this region, Israel? (Don’t hold your breathe. Buy canned-food futures.)

 

In the meantime, equally worrying is the left-leaning liberal mind-set in the USA (and in the UK), which is antipathetic to the genuine interests of the West, the mind-set of the modern day “useful idiots”^[3]. It was comprehensible (just) to support Soviet Russia over the West when its paradigm was communism. If you were a communist, you would naturally support Russian ideology over that of the West. Misguided, but in its own way honest. Preferring the Russia of Putin, and his Iranian allies, over the west, however, is just bloody-minded. A fascist kleptomaniac who has to pursue foreign adventures he certainly cannot afford, in order to distract attention from the profound problems that Russia has but he will never deal with constructively, there is nothing meritorious about him. Only this week he has been linked to the nuclear-poisoning of an opponent on the streets of London; and let us not forget that in the recent past he, or his cohorts (little goes on in Russia without his knowledge and assenting nod), were connected to fraud in international athletics and international football.

 

As for Iran, has it not been “a relentless font of evil”? Consider the Beirut barracks truck bombing of October 23, 1983, when 241 US servicemen were killed in an outrage widely ascribed to Iran and its clients, Hezbollah; the similarly executed 1992 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the Israeli embassy, which took the lives of 29 and injured 242 others; and the yet similar 1994 attack in the same city when 85 Jewish innocents were massacred in their community centre. Would you like this litany of evil brought up-to-date? Check out who is using, as an instrument of war, siege and the starvation of thousands of civilians trapped in Madaya and many other, less publicised, Syrian cities. None other than Syrian and Hezbollah forces, backed by Iran. Thirty-two years of relentless evil from its font in Tehran.

 

Support for Shia (Iranian) Islamo-fascism (as for post-Soviet Russia) is contrary to Western interests; but moral equivalence is a harsh mistress and demands incomprehensible and fathomless indulgence. The Stephen Kinzers of this world have built a bandwagon for themselves from which they are unable to descend – so they need to stay on it, even as it may take them to self-destruction, vociferously calling evil good. How they live with themselves when, as liberals, they fail to acknowledge – much less find repulsive – the homophobia, the misogyny and the cruelty (with 1,000 crude hangings a year in Iran) is beyond all understanding. Utterly irrational, it is one thing to empathise with the other viewpoint and quite another to subjugate one’s own interests in the pursuit of sanctimony.

 

Let us give the last word to Noel Coward, to show what can come of appeasement, at his prophetic best:-

 

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans,

When the age of peace and plenty has begun.

We must send them steel and oil and coal and everything they need,

For their peaceable intentions can be always guaranteed.

Let’s employ with them a sort of ‘strength through joy’ with them;

They’re better than us at honest manly fun.

Let’s let them feel they’re swell again and bomb us all to hell again,

But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.

 

© 2016 – Howard Epstein

Howard Epstein, LLB, is an English commercial lawyer of some 45 years’ standing. He still practices international commercial litigation on several continents. As such, he is articulate and voluble.

Howard is also a staunch Zionist, having achieved aliyah in September 2005, after a lifetime as “an armchair Zionist”. His parents met at a Habonim function and he was raised with Zionism on a daily basis. He is well-read, knowledgeable and opinionated about Jewish and Israeli history and current affairs.

 

[1] http://www.wsj.com/article_email/normalizing-iran-1453162144-lMyQjAxMTE2NzE4OTMxMzk3Wj

[2] The view of Bob Corker, Senate foreign affairs chief.

[3] Coined during the Cold War to describe communist sympathizers and fellow travellers.

Howard Epstein – DID A US JOURNALIST REALLY ASK “IS IRAN REALLY SO EVIL”?