Evans Liberal Politics
February 25, 2012

Listening Post – Drums of war:
The Media on Iran, Syria and in Libya

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Below is a fairly long (25:05) video produced by AlJazeera, the independent Arabic news operation which does a good job with the English language versions of its news and has a global reach. In my experience, they have been fairly unbiased as a news source. So when AlJazeera does a segment describing the current media frenzy regarding an imagined necessity of going to war with Iran, and comparing that to the run-up to the Iraq war, it sends chills down my spine. And it should for you, too.

If you remember,there was absolutely no need to go to war with Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and even the last U.N. inspectors who had been in Iraq (not too long before the war) stated that, while there was no transparency in the inspection process, there also was no evidence of a dangerous capacity in regard to WMD. Moreover, Saddam Hussein (the dictator in Iraq) was a secular Muslim, who hated fundamentalist groups such as Al Qaeda. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the U.S. invaded.

Do you remember all the speeches Bush made about WMD and “yellowcake” going to Iraq from Africa and “significant contacts” between Iraq and Al Qaeda? Do you remember the sham speech that Colin Powell was conned into making at the U.N., which gave us the necessary backing to go to war with Iraq?

In this video, the second and third sections are about the media in Syria and the altogether new, free media in Libya.

Please at least watch the first part, describing the building media hysteria about going to war with Iran. Going to war with Iran is a much bigger deal, than was going to war with Iraq, too. You would see the whole Middle East region go up in flames. Israel would be fighting a war on three fronts, against Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria. Probably the U.S. and likely Saudi Arabia would be fighting Iran inside Iraq. (Iraq and Iran share a 906 mile (1458km) border.)

It is also likely that it would be necessary to re-instate the draft, and that gasoline prices would double, destroying the economy’s fragile recovery and sending America deep into an economic depression.

There is no evidence that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program has reached the level of 90 percent purity, necessary to produce an atomic weapon. The last news I read about it had their enrichment level at 20 percent, which is a level consistent with medical uses.

One fifth of the world’s oil passes through the 21 mile-wide Straits of Hormuz, adjacent to Iran. There are two (and only two) main Saudi oil terminuses and Iran has 1,000 or more ballistic missiles. Do you think we could put in a sufficient number of Patriot missile batteries so that the Saudi oil terminuses remained safe? Likewise, Israel has only two major cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So that would give Iran only four primary targets for 1,000 or 1,500 ballistic missiles.

Folks, do we really want to do this?

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