Caitlin Johnstone

Sharing the world with neocons is like living with an Alzheimer’s patient.

“I want to go home!”

“You are home, Mum. Remember? You live here now with me and Dave? And your grandkids? You’ve been living here for two years. This is your home.”

“Oh, okay.”

[Two minutes pass.]

“I want to go home!”

Except they’re not forgetful. They’re just evil.

And here we are again, going through the exact same dance once more. On last night’s Hannity, three longtime Iran hawks were gathered before Fox News cameras like we’ve never done this before to explain to their audience how deeply concerning it is that the US government isn’t providing weapons to Iranian protesters, and how we should all want the US government to support the opposition groups by giving them whatever they want.

Sean Hannity, who was one of the loudest and most aggressive proponents of the unforgivable Iraq invasion in US media, twice expressed grave concern when speaking with his two guests that the protesters in Iran don’t have weapons to protect themselves from the Iranian government.

“Let me ask you,” Hannity said to Amir-Abbas Fakhravar, “you have helped organize what’s happening today. You are in touch with them every day. How do you win a revolution without weapons? When you have the Quds and the Revolutionary Guard and the other military?”

He then said to former UN Ambassador John Bolton, “I don’t know of many revolutions that people win with slingshots and baseball bats. If people aren’t armed, Ambassador, my fear is we will wake up to a massacre of a lot of these young students. That is a fear that I believe is quite legitimate, sadly.”

Bolton, who remains one of the only people on the planet still insisting that the Iraq invasion was a good decision, agreed with Hannity’s melodramatic show of concern, and said that if opposition forces rise up in Iran, America should give them whatever they want.

“I think we’ve got to go to the various aspects of the opposition — this is a very complex phenomenon that’s going on — and see what we can do to help them,” said Bolton. “I think in the immediate near term they need communications help inside Iran because the government has been effective in shutting down or slowing down the internet. I think they need finances so that they can communicate better inside Iran, and ultimately they may need assistance more than that. Now the opposition here in the United States, which is pretty fearsome, says ‘Oh my goodness that would taint what’s going on in Iran!’ You know honestly the people who know best what they need are the opposition figures inside Iran. If they’re content to take American and other outside support, I think we should provide it to them.”

These are protests these men are talking about. There’s no reason to even be talking about this as though it’s a civil war at this point in the game (and judging from some reports the protests themselves are already diminishing), and yet these insatiable neocons are talking about this with the same salivating exuberance with which they spoke of arming “moderate rebels” in Libya and Syria.

These interviews reveal that socio-economic justice is central demand of protestors who decry free market, capitalism, scrapping govt subsidies & inequality. In other words, contrary to US fantasies, the freedom demanded is positive freedom to rather than negative freedom from https://t.co/oKyy2DO74Z

— Amal Saad (@amalsaad_lb) January 2, 2018

Amir-Abbas Fakhravar was there to help spin the “revolution” narrative. After taking time to spell out for the Islamophobic Fox News audience that the crowd protesters had been chanting “Death to Ayatollah” but “no allahu akbar chant at all,” Fakhravar went on to gush about how these are the kind of people who can change the entire Middle East, again echoing western sentiment about the so-called Arab Spring which led to the disasters in Libya and Syria just a few years ago.

“This is a revolution,” Fakhravar said.

This is a man with extensive and well-documented ties to neoconservativesand Iran hawks. Billionaire oligarch Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump campaign donor in 2016 and once advocated dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to scare its government into compliance, once said he liked Fakhravar because he’d said that if the US attacks Iran, “the Iranian people will be ecstatic.”

If you want further evidence that Fakhravar is a propagandist being used to advance a pro-interventionism narrative, look no further than his Wikipedia page, the top of which looks like this: 

In his Hannity appearance, Fakhravar made sure to tell the audience to Google him and find out about his suffering under the Iranian government, which Hannity also took some time to brief them on.

So we’ve got three longstanding Iran hawks carefully constructing a propaganda narrative for the Fox News crowd explaining why it will be a good thing if America does with Iran exactly what it did with Libya and Syria. In both those countries large protests were quickly infiltrated by foreign actors, and extremist factions quickly arose to be covertly armed, funded and trained by the US and its allies. These actions snuffed out half a million human lives in Syria and created a failed state in Libya where people are now sold as slaves.

The CIA, which has an extensive history of starting wars and staging coups in countries all around the world, has cranked up its operations in Iran during the Trump administration, which is reportedly now working to “incubate the nascent Iranian revolution”. The CIA provided arms to extremist opposition forces in both Libya and Syria.

The mainstream media (and we can expect the more “liberal” MSM outlets to follow suit in due time) are doing this to manufacture consent for more regime change interventionism in yet another Middle Eastern country. They are doing this because they require that consent. The amount of inconvenience that can be caused by a populace who will not tolerate more senseless warmongering and destabilization projects on the other side of the world causes too many obstacles to make it worthwhile, so enough outrage and noncompliance can be all it takes to spare the world that much more chaos and bloodshed.

They are working to manufacture consent, just like they did with Iraq using the same damn goon squad. The thing about consent, though, is that it can be given or withheld. So withhold it. Be intensely skeptical of this same power structure that lied to you about Iraq. Stare them right in the eye, point and scream whenever they do something weird, and let them know you see them and you refuse to allow another country to be decimated in your name.

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