By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
The CPD adopted this format, it tells us, because "some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need for solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement," and the CPD believes "those questions need to be squarely addressed."
1. Consider first the CPD’s selectivity. A look at its "Past Sign-on Statements and Letters" and elsewhere on its website (e.g., "Statement of Purpose") shows that, in contrast to its lengthy, 4,000-word Q&A of July 7, as well as its earlier statement on the "Crisis in Iran" (June 17), the CPD has yet to put up a Q&A related to or a statement announcing its solidarity with the mass demonstrations in Honduras after the June 27-28 military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of the country, Manuel Zelaya. Neither has the CPD announced its solidarity with the 100 or more indigenous victims of a June 5 massacre by the government of Alan García in Peru, which some groups are calling the "Amazon’s Tiananmen," nor with the high numbers of civilian victims of the several-year-long U.S. and NATO bombing campaigns over Afghanistan and Pakistan, now sharply escalated by the new Democratic administration.
If we expand the purview of perpetrator-and-victim sets beyond
Given that Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt is on the U.S. payroll and a part of the "global spider’s web" of secret prisons run by Washington, shouldn’t we have been more concerned with Egypt’s last presidential election in September 2005, which Mubarak, effectively Egypt’s president-for-life, won with 89% of the vote? Shouldn’t we pay more attention to the complete absence of elections in
In each of these theaters and the many others that fall within the U.S. sphere of influence and responsibility, the potential benefits of a sustained left-critique and consciousness-raising about U.S. policy and its devastating impact on the lives of people are far greater than anything to be gained by urging "solidarity" with dissenters in a distant land where the U.S. influence for constructive purposes is minimal, but its hostile and destructive interventionism has been and remains great.
2. Is it a mere coincidence that these neglected matters, all of which bear undeniably on the cause of peace and democracy, are also ones in which a thoughtful Q&A would inevitably challenge U.S. policy action or inaction, whereas a focus on Iran at this moment fits instead the long-term U.S. policy of demonization, isolation, sanctions, destabilization, and eventual regime-change?
Contemporaneous New York Times coverage of events inside Iran and Honduras (for example) reflects exactly the same set of priorities: That is, on the one hand, a heavy focus on the Iranian election, the charge of vote-fraud on behalf of Ahmadinejad, the protests against this, the violent crackdown across Iranian society, and the shaken legitimacy of the Islamic Republic; and, on the other hand, the downplaying of the Honduran coup and the protests and repression there, the possible U.S. role behind the scene, the credulous reporting of the formula repeated by the Obama administration that it seeks the "restoration of the democratic order in Honduras," rather than of the ousted President, sober questions about what the Honduran Constitution does and does not permit, and a barely concealed apologetics for the coup.
The contrast in the Times‘s treatment of
For progressive Americans, aren’t the New York Time‘s priorities upside-down? But then how about those of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy? It is interesting that the CPD actually lauds the news media’s performance on Iran, claiming that "there is no good evidence so far that Western news reports on the government’s electoral fraud and violence repression of dissent have been fundamentally inaccurate" (#7). But there were gross inaccuracies in the establishment media’s assertion of vote fraud. As Mark Weisbrot points out,[5] the first sentence in the lead, front-page story run by the New York Times on June 23 reported that "Iran’s most powerful oversight council announced on Monday [June 22] that the number of votes recorded in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters there by three million, further tarnishing a presidential election that has set off the most sustained challenge to Iran’s leadership in 30 years."[6] Yet, Weisbrot adds,
Candidates campaigns have said that in 80-170 towns and cities, more people have voted than are eligible voters. We have determined, based on preliminary studies, that there are only about 50 such cities or towns….The total number of votes in these cities or towns is something close to three million; therefore, even if we were to throw away all of these votes, it would not change the result.[7]
So there were 3 million total votes in the 50 towns and cities, not 3 million over-votes. Furthermore, the over-votes did not prove fraud. Iranians can vote at any polling place, so it is—according to the government—common to have more votes than eligible voters where there are a lot of commuters, vacationers, or areas where the voting districts are not clearly delineated. Yet the Times misleading report was picked up widely and used to convince people that the government had "admitted" to having stolen three million votes.
Given the
3. By portraying the Islamic Republic as even more of an outlaw regime than it had been portrayed prior to June 12, doesn’t this intensive focus on discrediting the Iranian election feed nicely into the U.S.-Israeli destabilization and regime-change campaign? No matter how much the CPD protests otherwise (#13), doesn’t its call for "solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement" and its advocacy for "a different form of government in
Much intelligent analysis has pointed to similarities between a strategy employed by the Mousavi camp in June 2009, and the strategy’s use in earlier campaigns of destabilization against
But the regnant portrayal of Iran’s 2009 election as a sham, riddled with fraud and illegitimate, also reminds us of the Reagan administration’s propaganda campaign in 1984, which focused on the hostile Sandinista treatment of the newspaper La Prensa, the withdrawal of Contra leader Arturo Cruz from the election, and other actions that delegitimized it, thus justifying further U.S.-sponsored terrorism. As early as July 1984, Ronald Reagan himself had likened the Sandinistas’ proposal to hold elections in November to a "Soviet-style sham." The
For progressive Americans who’d like to "make it clear to the Iranian people that there is ‘another America’, one that is independent of the government and opposed to its oppressive and anti-democratic foreign policy" (#12), but whose memory of their own government’s history has yet to be Twittered-away, isn’t the net-effect of the CPD’s activism to increase the likelihood that the next president of Iran, some time in 2013 (if not sooner[12]), will be a U.S.-supported candidate—in the pattern of the "remarkable victory" of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro in 1990 that delivered a "devastating rebuke to the Sandinistas," as the New York Times
4. Even the language used by the CPD displays a revealing bias. At no place in its July 7 Q&A does the CPD refer to the
But in the CPD’s November 2002 statement (later updated), "We Oppose Both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. War on Iraq: A Call for a New Democratic U.S. Foreign Policy," such invidious language is used only to describe the regime of Saddam Hussein, whom it calls a "killer and serial aggressor," and a "tyrant who should be removed from power," but never the United States.
"War"—not George Bush or the
The CPD recognized that President Bush’s objective was "to expand and solidify
5. The CPD goes to great length to deny that the post-June 12 protests in
But "foreign control" and "calling the shots" are extreme forms of foreign meddling, and we regard them as straw men of the CPD’s making. Another straw man is the CPD’s repudiation of the notion that "millions of people in the streets" were on the CIA’s payroll, the CPD implying strongly that the consequences of
But who ever said that huge numbers of Iranians were on the CIA’s payroll? More to the point: Does the CPD have any "credible evidence" that none of them are?[14]
Surely the CPD knows that in early 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $75 million "in emergency funding to step up pressure on the Iranian government, including expanding radio and television broadcasts into
The CPD ignores ABC TV’s report in 2007 that the CIA "received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government," a policy that "would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime," retired CIA officer Bruce Riedel told ABC. The CPD also ignores Seymour Hersh’s report about a "major escalation of covert operations against
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate