The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran's Revolutionary Guard is a 'terrorist' organization, if imposed, the declaration would suggest another twist in the more confrontational turn in US governments approach to Iran, and would be the first time that the United States has added the armed forces of any sovereign government to its list of terrorist organizations. Putting the Revolutionary Guard on the foreign terrorist list would serve at least two purposes for the US : to pacify, for a while, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action, and to further press America’s allies to ratchet up sanctions against Iran in the Security Council.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/world/middleeast/15diplo.html?hp
Is'nt there something deeply ironic in this news? Is it possible that such a declaration may prompt impartial observers into considering whether the Bush administration possesses sufficient moral authority to apply this epithet to any element of a sovereign states defence forces, regardless of how quasi-autonomous of the Iranian state proper they appear to be?
The eminent American historian Howard Zinn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
has called the times we live in an 'age of irony'. In his book 'Terrorism and War' ( Chapter 3, A Peaceful Nation?, pp.50-56 Seven Stories Press 2002) he considers the history of the USA in terms of their claim to be a 'peaceful nation' a claim which George W Bush made when he announced the commencement of bombing in Afghanistan.
"You can't tell the Native Americans we were a peaceful nation as we moved across the continent and engaged in hundreds of wars against the Indians. The United States engaged in at least twenty military interventions in the Caribbean in the first twenty years of the last century. And then from World War II through today, we've had an endless succession of wars and military interventions.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/world/middleeast/15diplo.html?hp
Is'nt there something deeply ironic in this news? Is it possible that such a declaration may prompt impartial observers into considering whether the Bush administration possesses sufficient moral authority to apply this epithet to any element of a sovereign states defence forces, regardless of how quasi-autonomous of the Iranian state proper they appear to be?
The eminent American historian Howard Zinn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
has called the times we live in an 'age of irony'. In his book 'Terrorism and War' ( Chapter 3, A Peaceful Nation?, pp.50-56 Seven Stories Press 2002) he considers the history of the USA in terms of their claim to be a 'peaceful nation' a claim which George W Bush made when he announced the commencement of bombing in Afghanistan.
Just five years after the end of the most disastrous war in world history,
after World War II, we are at war in Korea. And then almost immediately we are helping the French in Indochina, supplying 80 percent of their military equipment, and soon we are involved in Southeast Asia. We are bombing not only Vietnam but Cambodia and Laos.In the 1950s, we are also involved in covert operations, overthrowing the governments of Iran and Guatemala. And almost as soon as we get involved in Vietnam, we are sending military troops into the Dominican Republic. In that period, we are also giving enormous amounts of aid to the government of Indonesia, helping the dictator Suharto carry on an internal war against the opposition, in the course of which several hundred thousand people are killed. Then the U.S. government, starting in 1975, provides critical support to Indonesia's brutal campaign to subdue the people of East Timor, in which hundreds of thousands of people are killed.
In the 1980s, when Reagan comes into office, we begin a covert war throughout Central America, in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and especially in Nicaragua, creating the counterrevolutionary force, the Contras, whom Reagan called "freedom fighters."
In 1978, even before the Russians were in Afghanistan, we are covertly sending arms to the rebel forces in Afghanistan, the mujahedeen. Some of these people turned out later to be the Taliban, the people who suddenly are our enemy. The national security adviser to Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted that he knew U.S. aid would "induce a Soviet military intervention" in Afghanistan. In fact, this happened, provoking a war that lasted ten years.[44] The war was devastating to the people of Afghanistan and left the country in ruins. The moment it was over, the United States immediately moved out. The people that we supported, the fundamentalists, took power in Afghanistan and established their regime.
Almost as soon as George Bush Sr. came into office, in 1989, he launched a war against Panama, which left perhaps several thousand dead. Two years later, we were at war in the Gulf, using the invasion of Kuwait as an excuse to intensify our military presence in that area and to station troops in Saudi Arabia, which then became one of the major offenses for Osama bin Laden and other Saudi Arabian nationalists. Then in the Clinton administration we were bombing Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Iraq again.
So for Bush to call us "a peaceful nation" means forgetting an enormous amount of history. Now, maybe that history is too much for Bush to take in, but even a small part of it would be enough to suggest that we have not been a peaceful nation. In fact, it is safe to say that since World War II, there has not been a more warlike nation in the world than the United States. "
With this weight of involvment in sponsoring wars, invasions, and dirty tricks against numerous sovereign states, United States governments in general and the Bush administration in particulat should steer well clear of flinging accusations at other governments. That is not to say that the Revolutionary Guard in Iran are a bunch of choirboys, far from it. Yet when the USA deems them to be 'terrorists' the impact of this accusation is sullied somewhat by the murky and unsavoury track record of the accuser. To point out this inconsistency is not 'anti-american' , in fact it is the strong desire of all right thinking people that the Government of the United States returns to the principles upon which that great nation was founded.
As Republican Congressman for Texas Ron Paul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul puts it in his book ' A Foreign Policy of Freedom'
"I believe our founding fathers had it right when they argued for peace and commerce between nations, and against entangling political and military alliances. In other words, noninterventionism....Noninterventionism is not isolationism. Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations. It does not mean that we isolate ourselves; on the contrary, our founders advocated open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations "
If the USA returned to these founders principles in the conduct of its foreign policy, then it would be going a considerable way to repairing the immense damage, that has , sadly, been done to its international standing in recent years. A restoration of the United States moral authority would permit it to make declarations concerning world affairs, which would attract the respect this nation deserves, putting an end to the mealy mouthed hypocricy as exemplified by this recent statement concerning the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
