New York Times Iran Vibe

by philg

It’s been a week since the U.S. attacked the peace-loving leaders of a peaceful Islamic theocracy. Let’s look at some of the wartime propaganda.

Sunday, March 1, a day after the hated dictator launched airstrikes while poolside in Palm Beach, the deaths of most of Iran’s senior leaders was just slightly more important than the second most important story: the Jeffrey Epstein saga. 93 million Iranians were without leadership for the first time since 1979, but also why didn’t the hundreds of U.S. government lawyers across multiple administrations manage to prosecute more of Jeffrey Epstein’s elite friends? (We know that it can’t be because it wasn’t actually criminal for Larry Summers to try to have sex with a 43-year-old or for Prince Andrew to be introduced to a 26-year-old female in a jurisdiction where the age of consent was 16.)

Today, the stories all seem to be reminding readers that Donald Trump is incompetent and mindlessly aggressive. Here’s part of the NYT front page in which Trump refuses to compromise while the Iranians are reasonable (apologizing):

CNN assembled PhD experts to do a “forensic analysis” and they concluded that war is damaging to infrastructure:

NYT, today, says that attacking Iran is pointless and, by implication, only a moron would order such an attack:

Also from today, the NYT says that only an incoherent (stupid) person would consider killing folks who chant “Death to America” while building nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles to deliver them to American cities:

The peaceful people of Lebanon, who declared war on the Zionist entity, never recognized the State of Israel, supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas (80%; 60% support among Lebanese Christians; 32% wanted to bravely attack Israel to help their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Gaza), and continue to fire projectiles at Israeli civilians are sadly forced to flee their homes because of Jewish aggression:

(The Israeli attacks on Beirut actually do confuse me. The Israelis told the Lebanese to evacuate and then bombed some empty buildings. How does that reduce Hezbollah’s ability to fight? The apartment buildings weren’t being used as forts.)

Another sympathy-provoking story from Lebanon. Merely because they declared war on their neighbor and refused to accept any peace treaty over a 75-year period, some Lebanese can’t sleep comfortably in their own beds:

Trump is far worse than Vladimir Putin (March 6): “Mr. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to disregard international norms and engage in foreign adventurism by fully exploiting Washington’s might.”

From March 3, perhaps it would make sense to prevent a nation of 93 million people from building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could deliver them anywhere in the world, but not if 900 people are killed:

(Comparison to the Bad Old Days: The U.S. killed 100,000 residents of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 and rendered 1 million homeless.)

In a politically diverse discussion group on Facebook, a passionate Democrat posted about 20 times about rising oil prices. In other words, Donald Trump has now convinced Democrats to support Islamic theocracy and also cheap fossil fuels for maximizing climate change. (Greta Thunberg has similarly been posting in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran; you’d think that at least she’d be happy that oil prices are higher and, therefore, that consumption will be lower.)

My own social media post on how Donald Trump has caused suffering on the home front:

13 thoughts on “New York Times Iran Vibe”

  1. I’m proud to live through this moment and to have him as president. In one year he will have toppled three dictatorships.

    No matter where you are on the political spectrum you should be able to appreciate what Trump has done for millions of people.

    Unless of course, you hate Trump more than you love freedom.

    Reply

    • > In one year he will have toppled three dictatorships.

      A sincere question, in case you are not being sarcastic, how does the States benefit by toppling autocrats in poor distant countries? Are you implicitly saying it as a corollary to the democratic peace theory?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory

      Since you are saying that it’s good for the people of those countries assuming that most people love freedom, but we do observe that they are totally pissed, with all the wars and demos going on. However, I would qualify it by saying that many Iranians in Canada definitely are publicy celebrating the assassination. But overall they are pissed, I think. Is there some other angle?

    • PF: I don’t think that Trump has said that he was toppling dictatorships for the benefit of the people who’ve been living under them. His complaints with Maduro were related to drug smuggling, oil asset expropriation, and exporting welfare-dependent humans to the U.S. To the extent that people who are in Venezuela are happier without Maduro that’s a happy side effect (though I guess you could argue that happy Venezuelans in Venezuela are less likely to show up to Maine, Ohio, and Minneapolis and compete with Somalis for welfare dollars).

      It’s the same situation in Iran. Trump’s argument for killing Iranian leaders is not that they have abused Iranians in Iran, but that these leaders have set up workshops where people chant “Death to America” as they design and build nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

      Trump isn’t doing anything about Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea or Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea because, much as people in their respective countries might suffer under their rule, they don’t poke sticks in the U.S.’s eyes.

    • Have they settled on a reason for the attack yet? I have heard perhaps half a dozen incompatible ones so far.

    • PG: Thanks! Trump’s argument (or the argument that implicitly arises from the theory that can be derived from his actions), assumes killing dictators is equivalent to toppling dictatorships. Dictatorship is an abstraction which seemed to have worked for those countries for so long, that doesn’t go off so easily. Many times when the dictator is assassinated there’s what these analysts call “rally around the flag affect” similar to a child becoming more obstinate when punished. Looks like that’s happening in Iran.

      IMO, if there no theory behind action one just wings it, or in very rare cases they are so intently observing what’s going and working with a theory real-time that they don’t have time to disconnect theory from their action, like in the case of very successful businessmen, generals, warriors or kings.

      In Trump’s case I don’t know. I hope it’s the latter.

    • PF: Iranians can be as “obstinate” as they choose to be. As U.S. bombing continues, however, they will lose their capacity to design and build sophisticated weapons. Everything that they need for a weapons industry is vulnerable to attack from the air, e.g., oil infrastructure that generates a wealth surplus, electricity generating plants, labs and factories, telecom switches, communication antennae. They don’t have a jungle canopy, as the Vietnamese enjoyed (Vietnam was 85% rural in the 1960s; Iran is 80% urban). If the government doesn’t have 100% support among its subjects, everything becomes vulnerable to a disgruntled Iranian ratting out the GPS coordinates via WhatsApp.

      I don’t know what your source is for Iranians “rallying around the flag”. Maybe you have better information than everyone else. Given that the Iranian government has shut off the Internet there, I don’t know how opinion could be surveyed.

    • > I don’t know what your source is for Iranians “rallying around the flag”. Maybe you have better information than everyone else.

      LOL! Just YouTube (I listen to Alastair Crooke, Larry Johnson, Chas Freeman, Stephen Walt, John Mearshiemer, Douglas McGregor, Larry Wilkerson, amongst others, and discuss with some folks what they are hearing in India), and sometimes I read online news in English from different countries, and then my own intuition. These folks I listen to do actually have better information than everyone else.

      For example, this gives a sense of what the Iran government wants to project is happening:

      https://www.rt.com/news/634174-iran-us-lego-video-pr-war/

    • Meh, mere minions, anon. Lucifer is the real dictator, that ol’ prince of darkness.

  3. Barnard is what hit me yesterday, the hate directed at women nearly brought me to tears. Damn, you have to live in fear as the leader of a liberal arts college? As a cis hetero male, I took an econ class there, and lived in their dorm for a year. I really bonded with those ladies, many of them quite innocent and wholesome in the gruesome sea of Bacchanalia and Caligula around them. Columbia had more of the feminist and it’s all good sexy-sexy nonsense. It materially distracted from getting some kind of education out of that place. I really think Columbia should have stayed all-male and had weekly mixers and exchanges like I had with Barnard; I’m a hopeless traditionalist, I know.

    I was looking Barnard up on the web yesterday, ignorant of the news, to see what the college was up to. Unbelievable. I wish everybody would just take the protests somewhere else, and let the Barnard ladies get their education. Barnard Strong. I really think this is a takeaway moment for the woke movement to see who they are supporting.

    Reply
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