Ervand Abrahamian, Iran expert at CUNY, made a few interesting comments to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now in regard to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia. Abrahamian was baffled by Ahmadinejad’s lack of response to the increasing “tempo” of the neocon plan to shock and awe Iran, kill countless grandmothers and toddlers, and usher in “democracy” by way of cruise missile and bunker buster.

“I was surprised because he didn’t really use the opportunity to try to lower the tempo, the serious problem we have now, which is we’re at the abyss of war, basically. And there are people pushing for war in the next few months. And this would have been a very good opportunity to try to smooth things over, try to calm the tempo down,” Abrahamian told Goodman.

Of course, there will be no smoothing things over, as the neocons, firmly in control of the horizontal and vertical of U.S. foreign policy, are determined to engage in mass murder. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s speech was custom-made for the neocons, as it dealt with superficialities. As Abrahamian notes, “most of the questions from the audience missed the opportunity. They dealt basically with important identity questions, but they didn’t really deal with the issue that we are really on the abyss of war. And this is a far more serious issue than, you know, either ethnic or gender issues.” Obviously, “ethnic or gender issues” will be meaningless if Iran is destroyed, its social fabric rended, if the very institutions presumably tasked with addressing such issues are reduced to smoldering ruins.

No telling exactly why Ahmadinejad did not speak about the impending destruction of his country, although a few seem to believe he is part of the neocon-neolib conspiracy against Iran—a conspiracy with key players inside Iran itself. More than likely, Mr. Ahmadinejad is blinded by pride, as the people of Iran have a long history of nationalism—and nationalism often blinds one to current realities. In addition, Ahmadinejad seems to believe attacking Iran is so crazy the neocons will not engage in such behavior, never mind their vicious and bloody track record, horrifically on display in neighboring Iraq. Abrahamian continues:

Ahmadinejad didn’t say it … but his policy is that there is no likelihood of war, because no one in their right senses would think of invading or attacking Iran. And that’s the premise he works on, which is, I think, a completely wrong premise, because he doesn’t seem to understand American politics, the same people who gave us the war on Iraq, the same people who are running foreign policy now. But he begins from the premise that no one in their right senses would think of attacking Iran.

Indeed, the neocons have advertised long and hard, telling us repeatedly they intend to destroy Israel’s enemies—and enemies of the neoliberal doctrine or rather business plan, i.e., countries will not be allowed to opt out of IMF loan sharking operations and banker-investment fire sale schemes—and Mr. Ahmadinejad comes off as seriously clueless, thus lending credence to speculation he is part and parcel of the neocon-neolib conspiracy.

As Peter Goodgame details in his The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order, we are fed the Brothers Grimm story “that Khomeini’s revolt was spontaneous and populist, and that it overthrew a repressive dictatorship that was hated by the people but supported wholeheartedly by the United States. It is true that the Shah’s government was not a democracy and that his secret service, trained by the CIA, was one of the most effective intelligence organizations in the world. But what is not reported is that prior to the British-sponsored massive public relations campaign on behalf of the Ayatollah the government of the Shah was loved by the vast majority of the population.”

It is worth quoting Goodgame at length:

The attack on the Shah’s government came through the Muslim Brotherhood and through the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, supported and manipulated by British Intelligence. Dr. John Coleman, a former British Intelligence agent and author of a number of books and monographs detailing the Establishment’s plan for a socialist world government, states in his report on Iran’s Islamic Revolution that the Muslim Brotherhood was created by “the great names of British Middle East intelligence, T.E. Lawrence, E.G. Browne, Arnold Toynbee. St. John Philby and Bertrand Russell,” and that their mission was to “keep the Middle East backward so that its natural resource, oil, could continue to be looted…”

Dr. Coleman writes that in 1980 the broadcasts of Radio Free Iran divided the enemies of the Shah into four categories: 1. Iranian politicians bought by the Israeli Shin Bet, 2. The CIA’s network of agents, 3. The feudal landowners, 4. The Freemasons and the Muslim Brotherhood (viewed as the same enemy).

In his report Dr. Coleman writes that in Iran, “At one time there was even a joke about the mullahs being stamped ‘made in Britain.’”

[…]

After the Shah stepped down in 1979 and fled the country his “firm ally,” the United States, even refused to allow him asylum forcing him to move with his family to Egypt. During the subsequent takeover of the American embassy when supporters of the Ayatollah kept Americans hostage for 444 days it became crystal clear to the entire world that the anti-democratic, anti-Israel Islamic movement was also very anti-West. Nonetheless the Anglo-American Establishment continued to support and promote radical Islam.

In 1977 Bhutto of Pakistan, who we will cover shortly, was removed; in 1979 the Shah of Iran was removed; in 1981 Sadat was assassinated, and in 1982 the Muslim Brotherhood revolted in Syria. Before 1977 the Middle East was on the verge of achieving stability and industrial and economic parity with the West through nationalist policies and high oil prices, but by the early ’80s the Middle East was in flames. Egypt was reeling and Mubarak was consolidating a shaky hold on power. Iran and Iraq, both armed by the West, were beginning their long war. Israel and Syria were invading Lebanon that was fighting a civil war, and Russia was invading Afghanistan whose rebels were being supported by Pakistan. The de-population and de-industrialization scheme advocated by the British and adopted by the Americans was off to a great start.

Indeed, we are witnessing the neocon phase of the “de-population and de-industrialization scheme advocated by the British,” a scheme that feeds conveniently into Israel’s interests as well. “Israel has for a very long time been a critical factor in America’s formulation of a policy vis-à-vis Iran,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, the largest Iranian-American organization in the U.S., told Democracy Now. “During the 1980s, in spite of the Iranian Revolution, in spite of Ayatollah Khomeini’s many, many harsh remarks about Israel, far, far worse than what anything Ahmadinejad has said so far, Israel at the time was the country that was lobbying the United States to open up talks with Iran to try to rebuild the US-Iran relations, because of strategic imperatives that Israel had. Israel needed Iran, because it was fearing the Arab world and a potential war with the Arabs.”


Israel did not need Iran—it was simply playing it off against more immediate enemies, viz., Iraq under faux nationalist Saddam Hussein and Ba’athist Syria. Now that Israel’s errand boy—under the direction of neocons ensconced in the Pentagon—have flattened Iraq and isolated Syria, Iran has predictably morphed into Israel’s numero uno “security threat,” complete with fantastic Brothers Grimm stories of mad “Islamofascist” mullahs with nukes. In the wake of these developments, Parsi admits, “the Israelis and the pro-Israel interest in the United States have lobbied to make sure that there is no dialogue or there’s no rapprochement between the United States and Iran. And the Iranians have done similar things. They have undermined every US foreign policy initiative in the Middle East that they feared would be beneficial to Israel. So the real shift in Israeli-Iranian relations come after the Cold War, not with the revolution in 1979,” a revolution, if we are to believe the research of Peter Goodgame, was fomented at the behest of British intelligence and the “Establishment,” that is to say the same old neoliberal suspects.

Either way—if Ahmadinejad is sincerely clueless or an agent working for British-U.S.-Israeli intelligence—it is truly astounding the president of Iran glossed over what should be considered, with a heaping dose of trepidation, the brutal and criminal shock and awe reduction of his country to a “failed” Neolithic condition, a fate front and center and gobbling up more newspaper column inches and bytes on the web than ever before.