Articles with the Tag Iran

Excusing dictatorships the liberal media way

Iran, Manufacturing Consent
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Sadly No is surprised and upset that the Wall Street Journal would defend the military coup in Honduras:

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

A far cry from their treatment of the Iranian elections in which its editorial opinion seems firmly on the side of the protestors and their demands for free and fair elections. How come the Wall Street Journal is so concerned about Iranian democracy but so cavalier about the Hondurian coup?

Simple. Iran is an enemy of the US and is therefore safe to attack. Honduras is an ally and what happened there has not be done without at least some level of support or approval from the US government, if not necessarily any official support. It’s an old, old tradition Mary O’Grady engaged in, this whitewashing of a military coup. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentine; every time the US government meddled in a South American country or allowed its military to thwart a nascent democracy, the newspapers of record were there to excuse it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “liberal” NYT or the “conservative” WSJ, every time an US supported coup happened, they helped whitewash it. Read Manufacturing Consent, read Killing Hope, dig through the newspaper archives and you’ll find the same thing over and over again.

And liberals fall for it everytime.

(Crossposted at Prog Gold.)

Green revolution or greenback revolution?

Iran, US foreign policy
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Are the Iranian protests just another colour revolution:

You see, it looks very much like a “color revolution” scenario: the US-favored candidate contests election results, claims victory, and his supporters riot till the government caves in. But then, couldn’t the incumbent actually steal the election knowing full well that he can paint the resulting opposition protests as a CIA/NED coup attempt, whether that is actually true or not?

Only a fool would rule out US meddling in Iran, but that does not remove the genuine grievances of the protestors. These protests would not have as much support as they do if there weren’t hundreds of thousands or even millions of people feeling that the elections were stolen, whether or not they were. Iranian elections may have been reasonably fair in the past, but there has been a history of government meddling in the past, through e.g. pre-election selection of “acceptable” candidates, that the idea of a much more blatant vote rigging is clearly not absurd to a large part of the Iranian electorate. That still doesn’t mean vote rigging has happened, no matter what Juan Cole believes, but it is a distinct possibility.

A colour revolution is a mock revolution, where the genuine wish for change on part of a given country’s population is channeled into a safe, US and EU approved direction. It works best against an autocratic but not dictatorial regime, which may be comfortable with busting heads and the occasional disappearance of an opposition member, but which still seeks the apparant approval of the population and which isn’t too bright or media savy. In contrast the opposition will be young and media friendly, aiming their campaign as much at western journalists as at their own people. They will have American money and American advisers to help the campaign and it will be put in media friendly terms, presented as a fight between reformists and conservatives, young vs old, Coke vs Pepsi. It’s fake, but driven by a genuine desire and although leftists should not be fooled by them, there’s still the need to engage that underlying wish. (In as far as we can do something, of course.)

On the one hand, you can’t just uncritically support the opposition as many liberals and conservatives are doing, as exchanging Ahmadinajad for Mousavi is like driving the devil out with Beelzebub. This is not a case of freedom versus oppression and anybody who believes it is will be disappointed, both in and outside Iran.

On the other hand, ignoring the situation won’t make it go away. A large part of the Iranian population wants more personal freedom, wants to have at least some of the things we take for granted in America or the EU, how horribly consumerist they and how horribly middleclass the protestors might be. We need to make sure that when we are critical of how our media reports about these events or about how liberal Mousavi actually is, that we don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. Iran is an oppresive regime and that needs changing and it’s the Iranian people that need to do it. We can only stand on the sidelines and argue our own (imperfect) understanding of the situation; we shouldn’t presume too much that we can actually give any meaningful advice.

But what we can do is push back against too triumphalistic a view of this revolution, the idea that this is a vindication for truth, justice and the American way, as long as we do it without denigrating the genuine desires of the Iranians themselves.

The Iranian elections

Manufacturing Consent, Media, War on Iran
Published on 2 Comments on The Iranian elections

Like Jamie I don’t share the Foreign Policy magazine’s experts certainty that the Iranian elections were rigged. Iran has a reasonable reputation for holding honest elections, even if they are, as Jamie puts it “engineered to produce the right results from the outset through candidate selection and so on”. Western experts and expat Iranians may have been convinced that Ahmadinejad was to be wiped from the pages of time and see the failure of this as evidence of voting fraud, but that doesn’t mean reality has to conform to their wishes.

The reason expert opinion has gotten it so wrong it seems to me is not fraud, but the myopia with which western news media and experts approach Iran: through the prism of US foreign policy. Iran is only in the news whenever its supposed nuclear weapons programme is brought to our attention again, or it’s accused of meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same way Ahmadinejad is only quoted when he says something stupid about the Holocaust or is supposed to threaten Israel with extinction again. We only get to see Iran as a menace and Ahmadinejad as a clown, with nobody really covering the reality of Iran’s internal politics.

So we get an incredible distorted view of Iran and Ahmadinejad and because we don’t like him we automatically assume this is the default view in Iran as well. But as Splinty points out, in the country itself he has a quite different reputation; he may not be liked by the western-orientated middle class, but he’s a friend of the poor and the peasants and they vote too.

And of course, expecting Iranians to vote according to our views of their foreign policy is as absurd as to have expected the last Dutch elections to have been decided on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq.

Manufacturing consent and the NIE

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iran
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I came across two great remarks today on how that National Intelligence Estimate helps shape the received wisdom on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. First quote is from Left I on the News, second quote from Aaronovitch Watch:

One of the successes of the new NIE is that virtually everyone in the “mainstream” (pundits, candidates, corporate media) now accepts as simple fact that Iran had a nuclear weapons program which it abandoned in 2003.

[…]

“News” in the same sense that it was “news” that Iraq didn’t have WMD – ie, it’s not news, it has been available for years, the international inspectors who know what they’re doing and publish their results have been giving exactly this message, but now some sekrit American intelligences have said the same thing, it is no longer possible to pretend otherwise[.]

The news cycle on this issue was from start to finish driven by the American government. The US says Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and the debate is on whether the US should impose sanctions or use military force to stop this, not on whether or not its claims are actually true. When the issue of truth did arise, it was presented as “he said, she said”, with the truth of the matter, that international inspectors had not found any evidence of Iranian wrongdoing, largely not being reported or only glossed over. Only when the NIE confirmed this was it converted to the official truth, though as Left Eye remarks, with the caveat that Iran had a nuclear programme before 2003, again something I haven’t seen any evidence for.

In other words, there have White House originated limits in the reporting on this issue, beyond which the newsmedia, whether approving or disapproving of the US stance on Iran, whether British, American or Dutch, have largely not strayed. And this is not done through some sort of Stalinist censorship, but purely through the news media’s internalised ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable reporting. As Chomsky and Herman discussed so many years ago, the media operate under a set of self imposed filters, filters that hinder its ability to determine the real truth and instead lead it to present a severely skewed image of the world.

US government acknowledges reality, sort of

US foreign policy, War on Iran
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Big news yesterday, as Pradva on the Hudson revealed that “American intelligence agencies” have come to the conclusion that “Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen”. The $64,000 question is how much this actually matters: will it halt or slowdown Bush’s war preparations against Iran (that is, if war with Iran is actually on the cards and is not just used as a convenient threat). Lenny is guardedly optimistic on this, but I’m not so sure. The Bush administration has never let itself be embarassed by inconvenient facts before, so why should this time be different?

In general the report does not say anything new about the whole Iran “crisis”. We already knew that the accusations of nuclear chicanery were bogus. The only new thing is that a segment of the American government has finally managed to acknowledge reality, which is a step forwards, I guess. However since the report does say that Iran had been working on a nuclear bomb back in 2003, in a roundabout way it strengthens the Bushite narrative as Iran as an unreliable, aggressive power.

Now as far as I know, only American or American backed sources have ever said that Iran was working on nuclear weapons, there has never been any independent confirmation of this, so the fact that the US government and the media finally have to acknowledge Iran isn’t working on them
now is decidedly a “glass half empty” situation. Especially since it allows the Bushites to argue that their strongarm tactics have worked, as they’re already doing.