[continued from previous message] 
  
 U.S. support for the Mujahadeen Khalq Iranian militant group based in Iraq, 
 withdrawal of trade sanctions and an end to U.S. hostility. Welcomed by 
 Powell, the overture was contemptuously rejected by Cheney's office-much as 
 overtures from Iraq and Syria had been summarily rejected earlier by 
 officials saying, "We don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it." 
  
 Is it not obvious that any strike against Israel or the U.S. from Iran 
 would result in unacceptable consequences for the Islamic Republic? Is it 
 not obvious that Netanyahu's sensationalistic genocide charge is part of a 
 general propaganda campaign intended to pave the way for an unprovoked 
 attack on a sovereign nation? In Israel itself, supposedly marked for 
 annihilation, the putative Iranian threat is hyped by some, downplayed by 
 others. Efraim Halevy, former head of the dreaded spy agency Mossad, 
 recently dismissed the notion that Iran poses "an existential threat to 
 Israel." 
  
 "Israel is indestructible today," he declared. "It's not so simple just to 
 think you can have a device on your hand and you will able to hurl it on to 
 a certain location and wipe out a nation Israel has known of this threat 
 [from Iran] for more than a decade-and-a half and has watched this threat 
 grow you must assume that Israel was not sitting on its hands ... or 
 [waiting] for someone else to do the job" Can Iran destroy Israel? "I don't 
 think this is doable in pure operational terms." 
  
 So enjoy what Ha'aretz called the "international public relations 
 campaign," the general the "informational warfare machine" as it heats up. 
 Expect to be told more and more in the coming weeks that Iran is not only 
 killing U.S. troops in Iraq, but threatening your very existence. Imagine 
 the boldest of Straussian "Noble Lies" screaming from your TV screens for 
 weeks. Iran's fanatical leaders, we'll be told, want a caliphate stretching 
 from Spain to Indonesia. They want mushroom clouds over New York. They want 
 genocide---indeed they're already planning genocide. And so (as Bush and 
 Hilary both declare) "nothing is off the table" when it comes to "dealing" 
 with the Islamic Republic. 
  
 Gevalt! Netanyahu cries. "Gevalt!" one should reply to the warmongers, and 
 ask: How have these shameless disinformation artists fooled so many people 
 about this Iran 'threat'? 
  
 How has a discredited administration brought us so close to another crime 
 against peace as defined by the Nuremburg Principles and United Nations 
 Charter? 
  
 How has the Iran attack lobby acquired such political clout in this 
 country? 
  
 How have shrewd political manipulators even been able in any respectable 
 forum to connect opposition to the slaughter of Iranians with 
 anti-Semitism? 
  
 How did the 9-11 attacks of receding memory propel this country into such 
 an era of madness? 
  
 How can the Democrats swept to power in a wave of antiwar revulsion sit on 
 the fence or actively assist as the administration plans to use its own 
 (real, existing) nuclear weapons on Iran? 
 Gevalt indeed! 
  
 Ivashov doubts that "the world's protests can stop the U.S." and suggests 
 that "the revenues of [the U.S.] military-industrial complex" is what 
 "matters to Americans." I can only hope we prove him wrong, mobilizing to 
 end the Iraq War, to impeach the war criminals in power, and to stop the 
 attacks on Iran and Syria before they start. 
  
  
 [Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct 
 Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands 
 and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The 
 Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in 
 Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor 
 to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and 
 Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: 
 gleupp@granite.tufts.edu] 
  
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