Sunday, June 14, 2009

Iran: stop and take a deep breath

David Seaton's News Links
In regard to the Iranian elections, I think it would be wise to pause before jumping on any bandwagon.

The western media reaction is beginning to remind me a bit of all those "(choose color) Springs", that the CIA organizes here and there, from time to time.

I am surprised at how much footage of police brutality is being freely filmed by western journalists and how freely they are allowed to beam this footage out of Iran. My experience of dictatorships tells me that this sort of thing is not typical of dictatorial behavior. (check Burma etc)

If I was going to make a "dark" reading of all of this, I might come to a tentative conclusion: that if someone wanted to start a war with Iran, this media frenzy would be just the sort of agit-prop to prepare western public opinion for something "surgical".

We lived through this same "Hitler of the month" thing with Bush and his neocons in the run up to the war in Iraq. This might be similar, only much better done this time.

In short, I don't trust US corporate media, or its "opinion makers" any more now than I did then. DS

4 comments:

Kurz said...

If I were Obama I'd keep the same policy regarding Iran. Try to improve relations, whether it's I'madinnerjacket or Mousavi. Pressuring Iran and accusing its regime of vote fraud will only lead to a quicker development of the bomb.

Anonymous said...

Hi David:
I have always trusted Prof. Juan Cole for his Mideast analysis and he seems to think the election was stolen:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

I would not consider Cole a part of the corporate media.

David Seaton's Newslinks said...

Juan is a wonderful man, but his wife is Persian, I believe... Blood is thicker than toothpaste.

Anonymous said...

FYI:

From the Washington Post:
"The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. 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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html