Friday, December 23, 2011

A Response to Seumus Milne'S Article in the Guardian

The last paragraph in Seumas Milne's latest article in the Guardian, 'War on Iran Has Already Begun', concludes in this way

Maybe it won't happen. Maybe the war talk is more about destabilisation than a full-scale attack. But there are undoubtedly those in the US, Israel and Britain who think otherwise”

Just in this paragraph alone, it is clear for an unbiased reader that Milne has conveniently forgotten to include the other side of the equation, i.e. 'those in the Islamic Republic' who are craving for a full scale attack. The entire article is in fact riddled with convenient half baked information, like the assassination of Iran's nuclear scientists just to name one, posed as facts to back up his ideologically motivated presentation.

First lets remind ourselves with just a few proponents of 'full-scale attack', some of the real warmongers Seamus Milne conveniently forgot to even mention.

Former head of the Revolutionary Guards, Rahim Safavi, now special military advisor to the Supreme Leader, in a conference held two weeks ago, in Lanjan, near Isfahan, said this:
We should confront the enemy with offensive actions and not just with words and slogans. Our enemies are like dogs with rabies and we should strike them in the head with a stick. We must adopt an offensive strategy”

Safavi's statements came a few days after Amirali Haji-Zadeh, the head of the Islamic Republic's aerospace, who said “A military attack on Iran is our wish”.
General Firoozabadi, the hugely overweight head of Iran's Combined Armed Forces, a medical doctor by training who has no military experience and was purely promoted to the rank of General by the Supreme Leader for his vulgar servility, resonated similar aspirations by saying “I thank God twice a day that I am getting closer to martyrdom”

And these are the words of Commander Naghdi, the head of Baseej militia, in a televised interview:
I tell you, if on this very day, the Islamic Republic attacked America, the Americans will not have the military capability to respond, they will stretch their hand out for negotiations saying come on lets somehow sort this out, not only they can't attack us but if we attack them they won't be able to respond either, really this is how it is, with what economy? With what public opinion backing do they want to attack?. ...I tell you the Baseej's most muted response to the slightest attack by the Zionist regime will be the liberation of the Quds(Jerusalem) nothing less for sure. ...for reasons of secondary edicts and some international considerations and the current priorities we are biding our time, otherwise everyone (Baseej Members) is counting down the moments for an excuse to come up, so we can go and finish off these Zionists'

Readers may be interested to know that the Iraqi born Commander Naghdi, was dismissed during the Khatami years for having been involved in a number of armed robberies, thirteen murders and several rapes and tortures. When Ahmadinejad became the president, Naghdi, a long time partner with Rahim Mashaei, the favourite deputy of Ahmadinejad and the father of his daughter-in-law, was reinstated in an official government position and became the head of the HQ in Fighting Smuggling Goods and Currency. It was like appointing Al-Capone as the head of tax collections. Ahmadinejad was soon forced to dismiss Naghdi, as part of a damage limitation exercise, after Naghdi's part in smuggling petrochemical commodities was exposed. The Supreme Leader, knowing Naghdi's capabilities in brutality and crackdown of peaceful protesters, appointed him as the head of the Baseej in order to contain the escalating post-election protests in 2009.

Such warmongering statements by Islamic Republic officials are of course nothing new. When Rafsanjani was still in the circle of the power brokers in Iran, he had said during a Friday sermon “Iran will be able to destroy Israel completely with just one nuclear bomb, but it will be much more difficult for Israelis to destroy all of Iran, as we are many more times the size of Israel”.

I am sure that Seamus Milne, nor the people in his niche market to whom his writings appeal to, have never even heard of a pamphlet titled “The Final Six Months”, widely distributed amongst the most zealous supporters of the regime for the last ten years. The prognostic pamphlet clearly spells out who is actually looking forward to the “final confrontation” and how the recent events in the region are all fulfilling the prophecy that requires the final confrontation.

Such warmongerings by the Islamic Republic officials are never mentioned by the likes of Seamus Milne. This is typical of those whose minds are seized by an ideology. Facts are put through a sieve and only those which fit within the beloved sacred ideology are strained while the rest just go down the sink hole. It is no wonder that with such blinkered visions, Seamus Milne believes Ahmadinejad won the elections and sees him as a popular hero 'who stands up for the country's independence, fights against elite corruption and uses Iran's oil to boost the incomes of the poor majority'.

Is Seamus Milne even aware of the level of corruption by Ahmadinejad's cronies? Has he even heard about the recent $3Bn banking scandal, the biggest fraud in Iran's history, by Ahmadinejad's associates? Milne's illusions of Ahmadinejad being the hero who champions the poor are fantasies too familiar by Milne's predecessors of Western useful idiots about other tyrants in the past.

Milne's blinkered outlooks and one sided analysis cast doubts on the genuineness of this former public school boy turned Marxist tyrannophile, in opposing war. Is he concerned about a military confrontation like most people are? or is his one sided exploitation of the issues just a means to serve his ideology?

Perhaps Seamus Milne too is craving for a large salary from Press TV like former Saddam Hussein sycophant, George Galloway, with whom he has repeatedly shared a platform.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Overlooking Iran's pre-emptive approach is indeed a failure of the ideologues in "Wstern liberal" circles. Failing to understand the complexities of the regime and Ahmedinjad's ever expanding business empire is just plain dumb, and serves the purpose of these commentator's devellping their own celeb personality status - an empty endeavour if ever there was one.

Anonymous said...

“Iran will be able to destroy Israel completely with just one nuclear bomb, but it will be much more difficult for Israelis to destroy all of Iran, as we are many more times the size of Israel”.

So?

Israel is many more times the size of Mecca.

Why is the Islamic Republic of Iran trying to destroy Mecca?