Two weeks ago a memo was leaked from inside the Trump administration showing how Secretary of State and DC neophyte Rex Tillerson was coached on how the US empire uses human rights as a pretense on which to attack and undermine noncompliant governments. Politico reports:
The May 17 memo reads like a crash course for a businessman-turned-diplomat, and its conclusion offers a starkly realist vision: that the U.S. should use human rights as a club against its adversaries, like Iran, China and North Korea, while giving a pass to repressive allies like the Philippines, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
“Allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies,” argued the memo, written by Tillerson’s influential policy aide, Brian Hook.
With what would be perfect comedic timing if it weren’t so frightening, Iran erupted in protests which have been ongoing for the last four days, and the western empire is suddenly expressing deep, bipartisan concern about the human rights of those protesters.
Big protests in Iran. The people are finally getting wise as to how their money and wealth is being stolen and squandered on terrorism. Looks like they will not take it any longer. The USA is watching very closely for human rights violations!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2017
The Iranian people, especially the young, are protesting for the freedom and future they deserve. I hope their government responds peacefully and supports their hopes.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 31, 2017
Secretary Tillerson reiterates the United States' deep respect for the Iranian people. We call on all nations to stand with us in demanding the regime respect their basic human rights. #Iranprotests
— Matthew Miller (@StateDeptSpox) December 31, 2017
Watching events in Iran with concern. Vital that citizens should have the right to demonstrate peacefully.
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 31, 2017
Exact same script from Kiev, Libya, etc dusted off again. Same words. Particularly cruel when you are preparing to bomb these same citizens to pretend to care about their rights… https://t.co/AWJJ896AIJ
— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) December 31, 2017
So we all know what this song and dance is code for. Any evil can be justified in the name of “human rights”.
In October we learned from a former Qatari prime minister that there was a massive push from the US and its allies to topple the Syrian government from the very beginning of the protests which began in that country in 2011 as part of the so-called Arab Spring. This revelation came in the same week The Intercept finally released NSA documents confirming that foreign governments were in direct control of the “rebels” who began attacking Syria following those 2011 protests. The fretting over human rights has occurred throughout the entirety of the Syrian war, even as the governments publicly decrying human rights abuses were secretly arming and training terrorist factions to murder, rape and pillage their way across the country.
We’ve seen it over and over again. In Libya, western interventionism was justified under the pretense of defending human rights when the goal was actually regime change. In Ukraine, empire loyalists played cheerleader for the protests in Kiev when the goal was actually regime change. And who could ever forget the poor oppressed people of Iraq who will surely greet the invaders as liberators?
In 2007 retired four-star General Wesley Clark appeared on Democracy Now and said that about ten days after 9/11 he learned that the Pentagon was already making plans for a completely unjustified invasion of Iraq, and that he was shown a memo featuring a plan to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
So it’s an established fact that the neocons have had Iran in their crosshairs for a good long time.
This is all coming off the back of the nonstop CIA/CNN narrative being advanced that Iran is a top perpetrator of state-sponsored terrorism, which is just plain false. I have a lot of Trump-supporting followers, and I would like to stress to them that the group of intelligence veterans who authored this memo about Iran is the same group who released a memo dismantling the bogus Russiagate narrative; these are good people and you can trust them. I encourage you to read it.
Iran, the Number One State of Sponsored Terror with numerous violations of Human Rights occurring on an hourly basis, has now closed down the Internet so that peaceful demonstrators cannot communicate. Not good!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 31, 2017
Trump is lying when he says Iran is “the Number One State of Sponsored Terror”. This is the same exact script they run over and over and over again, and people are falling for it again like Charlie Brown and the football. It is nonsensical to believe things asserted by the US intelligence and defense agencies on blind faith at this point, especially when they are clearly working to manufacture support for interventionism in a key strategic location. In a post-Iraq invasion world, nothing but the most intense skepticism of such behavior is acceptable.
Luckily, because a full scale invasion of Iran would be far more costly and deadly than the invasion of Iraq, support for this will need to be manufactured not just in America but within an entire coalition of its allies. This will be extremely difficult to do, but by God they are trying.
Please keep your skepticism cranked up to eleven on this Iran stuff, dear reader, and be very loudly vocal about it. My Trump-supporting readers especially, I implore you to think critically about all this and look closely at the similarities between the anti-Iran agenda and the other interventions I know you oppose. Together we can kill this narrative and spare ourselves another senseless middle eastern bloodbath.
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20 responses to “US Empire Is Running The Same Script With Iran That It Ran With Libya, Syria”
[…] Johnstone details how the US Empire is running the same script with Iran that it ran with Libya, Syria, and so many more, now destroyed and dysfunctional nation […]
[…] Johnstone details how the US Empire is running the same script with Iran that it ran with Libya, Syria, and so many more, now destroyed and dysfunctional nation […]
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Great article. Here is a bit more info for those who want to know who is actually behind these wars:
Wes Clark – America’s Foreign Policy “Coup”
http://youtu.be/TY2DKzastu8
02:10: “We’re going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in 5 years: We’re gonna start with Iraq, then we’re gonna move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”
03:00: “These people took control of the policy in the United States. … It came back to me. A 1991 meeting I had with Paul WOLFOWITZ. In 2001 he was Secretary of Defence but in 1991 he was the Under Secretary of Defence for policies, the number 3 position in the Pentagon.”
05:10: “This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy Coup. Wolfowitz, and Cheney and Rumsfeld and you can name another half-dozen other collaborators from the Project for New American Century [PNAC dual-citizen (Israel-US) members: William KRISTOL, Robert KAGAN (husband of Victoria NULAND involved in the Ukraine Coup), Randy SCHEUNEMANN, Ellen BORK, Reuel Marc GERECHT, Timothy LEHMANN, Michael GOLDFARB, Lawrence KAPLAN, Dov ZAKHEIM]. They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East. Turn it upside down, make it under our control…”
06:20 “KRISTOL, PERLE… they can hardly wait to finish Iraq so they can move into Syria…”
Google Ken O’Keefe “Greater Israel Project” and see Christopher BOLLYN:
http://www.bollyn.com and
https://bit.ly/TheyDitIt
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Hi Caitlin, when will you call out all the alt-right figures (Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec) for running the exact same neocon script the regime change people are? You once said we should ally with those people to stop war and the deep state….
Well I haven’t been infected by the call-out culture mind virus like you have, Robbie, so keeping track of who is advancing the exact right ideas on every single issue and then “calling them out” isn’t really something that I do. I don’t know anything about Posobiec (I literally tagged him one single time for help circulating an article), but Cernovich has been retweeting my anti-interventionism stuff on Iran. I’ve never spoken with him but he’s said publicly that he always reads my stuff, so hopefully the things I’ve been writing will get through to him. That would certainly be a lot more effective in my opinion than your obnoxious “call outs”.
The alt-lite people aren’t running the exact same script, FYI. Guys like Molyneux have been clearly saying they support the Iran protesters but oppose US intervention. They’re being stupid about the possibility of IC involvement on the ground in those demonstrations, and they are playing into the hands of the narrative by acting like this is definitely an innocent organic uprising, but your assumption that they’re acting like Bush supporters is wrong.
You have consistently been wrong about this, actually. I’ve been playing a useful role in sowing anti-war ideas into the right wing, and I’ve been interacting with many Trump supporters who see Iran more or less as I do, largely as a result of reading my stuff in some cases. There is a faction within Trump’s base who sees this issue clearly, and the left needs someone like me who can ignore the slander and vitriol from people like you enough to dialogue with them.
Speaking of slander, I’d like you to apologize for the following false allegations, which you know you have no evidence for:
https://medium.com/@FluorescentGrey/huh-bart-thats-odd-you-d-say-this-f71210a3ffff
I do wish you’d leave me alone, Robbie. I blocked you nearly a year ago for a reason. I didn’t know you were Abby’s brother when I blocked you; you were just some guy following me around and commenting on every single thing I said and did, and it creeped me out. It hasn’t gotten any less creepy, Robbie. Not since finding out who you are, and not since blocking you. I’m tired of people telling me you’re still talking shit, and I’m tired of getting notifications in threads where you’re talking shit. Leave me alone. You and I have nothing to do with each other. We are different creatures on different journeys, serving different functions. I have nothing to do with you. I am not yours. I am not your thing.
Thank you.
What any awesome article!
I have said the same to anyone that would listen but never articulated it as well as you have!
Thank you…I’m a new and faithful follower!
Keep up the fabulous work Caitlin!
PS – My kid is first year university in Journalism studies…I’ll be sharing with her!
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Good one Caitlin.
Trump’s ludicrous assertion that Iran is the ‘Number One State of Sponsored Terror’, is clearly designed to appeal to the general US masses that don’t understand the religious or geopolitical machinations of the region. Who is Iran sponsoring in the terror stakes? Apart from no one. They are predominantly Shia, and unless it’s changed since I last looked, the US, UK, NATO, Gulf State Coalition, Israel, Turkey and Uncle Tom Cobley have all been backing tens of thousands of Sunni Islamist butchers who have raped and murdered their way across Iraq and Syria. Any Iranian-backed Shia militias have been fighting on the side of President Assad to defend Syria and rid itself of these US-backed proxy mercenary Wahhabi, Salafist Takfiri groups hell-bent on destroying Syria. Therefore Trump heads up the number state of sponsored terror. Erdogan is another fine example, recently calling Assad a terrorist and claiming (without providing any evidence) that he is responsible for killing one million of his citizens. That pile of fact-free bollocks coming from a joker who let the terrorist hordes enter Syria through Turkey’s southern border, and who looted the factories of Aleppo and bought stolen ISIS oil. Who are the real terrorists here? Just reading those Twitter comments makes the blood simmer. That washed up old harridan Clinton and bimbo number one Neuart weighing in, and then you have the global village idiot, Johnson, having just embarrassed himself in Moscow, as if that wasn’t enough. Of course, Western mainstream media has neglected to report on the pro-Government rallies in Tehran that have dwarfed the largely anti-Govt student protests. So here we go again, the world’s policeman, the US of A and its cronies, looking to invoke another ‘humanitarian intervention’ by bombing a country back to the stone age.
Why would the narrative change? The same neocons that lied about Iraq and Libya are still lurking in Washington!
Next will be Lebanon, who will suddenly have an outpouring of protests, just like Ukraine and all the others did!
Strangely enough the studious avoidance of mentioning the prime movers, Israel, is suspicious