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Written by Paul Craig Roberts
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Tuesday, 16 June 2009 17:26 |
 How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other
country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists
even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France,
and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil,
Japan, or even China?
Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is
daily demonized in the U.S. media.
The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American
ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the
commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the
boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the
Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded
“revolution.”
Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first
democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the
1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in
place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents
who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American
puppet.
The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the
Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government
and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while
Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved
America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.
The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has
responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent
Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a
fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s
response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove
era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.
Leaders of the puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line
with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British
Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serioU.S. doubt” about
Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg.
Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply
following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the
defeated candidate preferred by the U.S. Government.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in
the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.
Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda.
Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one
Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate
election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”
What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet
states?
Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.
However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll
was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The
pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick
Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in
the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers
Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region
for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*
The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that
the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely
interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:
“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide
public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad
leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin
of victory in Friday's election.
“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting
portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent,
Mir Hossein Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's
provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.
“The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey.
During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri,
the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our
survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over
MoU.S.avi.
“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of
change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even
have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest
voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.
“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or
competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the
highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians
were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror
the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that
the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”
There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a
program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government
has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The U.S. media treats
these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American
Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign
media see these reports as evidence of the U.S. government’s inherent
immorality.
Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio
on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in
the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million
dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the
election.”
The success of the U.S. government in financing color revolutions in former
Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have
been widely reported and discussed, with the U.S. media treating it as an
indication of U.S. omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a
sign of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is
certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Moussavi is a bought
and paid for operative of the U.S. government.
We know for a fact that the U.S. government has psychological warfare operations
that target both Americans and foreigners through the U.S. and foreign media.
Many articles have been published on this subject.
Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself
nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense
standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear
attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as
is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender
and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?
Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American
puppet state?
Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is
secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in
thrall to Western devotion to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These
people are easily organized with American money to give their government and
Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.
The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create
a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.
On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report
the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared:
“Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here
is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving
only a military solution.
As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that
the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet
government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the
Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the
Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for
military attack.
With the help of Moussavi, the U.S. government is creating another “oppressed
people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American lives and money
to liberate. Has Moussavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who
was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet
ruler of Iran?
The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian
people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule
of Iran in 1978.
That is the script. You are watching it every minute on U.S. television.
There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among
hundreds, we have Gary Sick, who formerly served on the National Security
Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:
"If they'd been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51
percent," Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But
the government's assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote,
"is not credible."
"I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian
Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the
support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on
repression. The voice of the people is ignored."
The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found
that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.
But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other
peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.
Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven prevail over others,
morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until
America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is
isolated and universally despised.
You can find the Ballen-Doherty report here.
---
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be
reached at:
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Source: CounterPunch
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They failed time and again. They tried to stage a coup right after the revolution, and they failed. They employed their puppet Saddam to wage war on Iran, and they failed. They've tried to infiltrate the political system, and they failed. They've been trying to stage a velvet revolution and they have failed.
Their plots will blow in their faces time and again.