Ship of Fools: Britain, America and the Iranian Oil Tanker Incidents
Taking over from Britain’s colonial role in exploiting the country, the US has bullied and tried to intimidate Iran for decades. The ongoing pretext for strangling Iran economically is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly finds no evidence for this repeated US-led lie. Then-US President Barack Obama’s Task Force explained the real, as opposed to rhetorical, reasons for US opposition to Iran’s development of enriched uranium for its civilian nuclear energy programme, to which Iran is entitled under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty–a treaty regularly violated by the UK and US, and to which their ally Israel is not party, despite having undeclared nuclear weapons. The Obama-era Task Force report reads:
“So long as the United States firmly opposed Iran’s [civilian nuclear] Bushehr facility, no friendly Arab state actively pursued civil nuclear power. But once Washington accepted that Iran could have a nuclear power plant, the United States was in no position to press its friends not to pursue a capability it had agreed Iran could have … [I]f an agreement is reached legitimizing even limited enrichment on Iranian soil, other countries may well be interested in having the same capabilities, and it could be difficult diplomatically to dissuade them from this pursuit … Demonstrating how seriously the international community is concerned about Iran’s actions might discourage imitators.”
A media serving the interests of the public, not US foreign policy elites, would make this reminder–that Iran is being abused by the US to deter regional states from moving away from fossil-fuel dependence–regular headline news. Others want all-out war. Veteran reporter Seymour Hersh revealed a plan by then-US Vice President (some say real President), Dick Cheney, to stage a fake maritime incident between “Iranian” (disguised US vessels in reality) and US warships. Hersh says:
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