Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 20, 2010

It looks like years of incessant propaganda about Iran seem to have paid off. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans consider Iran to be the “least liked” nation on the planet. “Canada retained its top position in Gallup’s annual country ratings, with 90% of Americans viewing it favorably, unchanged from 2009. Iran continues to rank last, with 10% this year,” Gallup reports. Even the reclusive totalitarian state of North Korea fared better than Iran.

Is there a rational reason for Americans to rate Iran unfavorably? Most Americans know little to nothing about Iran beyond what they are fed by the corporate media. I bet most of them would be unable to find the country on a map.

Fox News reports that time is running out for Iran and military action is on the horizon.

In addition, according to a recent CNN poll, an astounding 71 percent of Americans believe Iran currently has nuclear weapons, a belief that is seriously at odds with the facts. The poll is testament to the effectiveness of unrelenting propaganda pushed by the corporate media.

The corporate media has increasingly called for bombing Iran. For instance, on February 9, the supposed liberal New York Times ran an editorial calling for crippling economic sanctions on the Iranian people and hinted at the prospect of attacking the country. “Enough is enough. Iran needs to understand that its nuclear ambition comes with a very high cost,” the newspaper opined.

The New York Times, with the neocon operative Judith Miller on-board, ran a number of propaganda pieces making the case that Iraq had WMDs when in fact it did not. Miller resigned from the newspaper and now appears as a regular on Fox News.

Our rulers hate Iran because it refuses to take orders from the bankers and their international organizations such as the United Nations and the loan sharking operations known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Saddam Hussein found out what happens when Muslims are too proud and refuse to take orders from Wall Street and the City of London.

The leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, said recently that “the Iranian nation’s resistance to the West set an example for the generation to come of how to confront pressure by reliance on its own capability and a divine source,” reports Press TV.

Khamenei said Iran’s resistance will “awaken the spirit of dignity in the whole Islamic Umma as our nation’s efforts have led to the Islamic vigilance” among other Muslim nations.

The United States and its junior partner Israel have pushed the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon and the supposed threat this would pose to the world for several years now. During the Bush years, this insane notion was primarily confined to the neocons, but since the election of Obama it has spread to liberals and Democrats. The bomb Iran chant is now becoming a nearly universal mantra within the political establishment.

Liberals and Democrats quite naturally oppose war and illegal mass murder campaigns when they are proposed by neocons and Republicans. But as Clinton’s invasion of Yugoslavia revealed, Democrats are all for serial murder when the call is made by the leader of their party.

A new regime at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency has produced a report saying Iran is working toward a nuclear weapon. In the recent past, the IAEA said there was no evidence Iran was attempting to build a nuclear weapon. This conclusion was backed up by a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate from the U.S. intelligence community that said Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program years ago. “When asked if the White House believes the IAEA report or the 2007 NIE estimate, officials had no comment except to suggest that they were looking forward to the new NIE on Iran, which they said was in the works,” reports The Washington Post.

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In other words, the next NIE estimate will probably agree with the IAEA. Critics of NIE estimates complain that the reports are subject to political polarization. Case in point: the October, 2002, NIE argued that Iraq had an active WMD program. Assertions that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons were essentially the same conclusions reached by the United Nations and numerous intelligence services.

It turned out Iraq did not have WMDs. It was all propaganda designed as a pretext to invade and occupy a country decimated by more than a decade of sanctions that resulted in the death of more than a million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children.

The United States is now pushing for crippling sanctions against Iran. “The White House has begun circulating sanctions against Iran as part of its pursuit of United Nations-backed punishment for Iran’s secretive pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Fox News reported on Friday. “We are internally and with partners beginning the process of thinking through what are the appropriate elements of pressure,” said Susan Rice, Obama’s foreign policy adviser and United States Ambassador to the United Nations. “And that will be a process that will continue over a period of time and I think we should be realistic about the pace.”

The U.S. cranked up the pace on sanctions after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iran is sliding into a military dictatorship. Two days later, on February 16, Clinton said Iran is working toward the development of a nuclear weapon. Clinton made her remarks after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated that Iran was ready to suspend enrichment if it could exchange its low-enriched uranium stockpile for processed fuel rods from abroad.

On February 9, Obama declared that he’s “bent over backwards” to engage Iran in “constructive” dialogue and the U.S. will push in the United Nations to sanction the country. Bush era leftover Robert Gates at the Pentagon added White House has gone further than any administration to reach out to Iran.

Mohammad Nahavandian, an Iranian businessman, said today that sanctions will not cripple the country’s economy. “It has been proven that the Iranian economy is not sanctionable… the stated goal of sanctions is political, which has never been achieved,” Nahavandian told Reuters in an interview.

Nahavandian said Iran was increasingly dealing with non-western countries, including Asian and regional countries. China, a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council, is reluctant to approve further sanctions on Iran. Trade between Iran and China is now over $28 billion. “With indirect trade, it may be about $31 billion, which is above the trade with the European Union,” Nahavandian noted.

Bush era neocons are pushing hard for a mass murder campaign against Iran. “America’s central focus must be to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in the first place,” Bush era UN ambassador John Bolton wrote for The Wall Street Journal on February 9. “Doing so requires decisive, and likely military, action now, since there is essentially no likelihood that an Obama-inspired ‘regime of sanctions’ will achieve that objective. The U.S. must rigorously avoid ‘sanctions’ or ‘pro-democracy’ rhetoric becoming excuses for American nonaction.”

John Bolton peddles the bomb Iran mantra on Fox News.

It remains to be seen if the U.S. will attack Iran or simply muddle along with ineffectual economic sanctions. If the U.S. does attack Iran, however, the consequences will be great, as Russia’s General of the Army Nikolay Makarov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, said recently. Makarov warned that an American attack on Iran now, when the US is bogged down in two wars, might lead to the collapse of the United States.

Makarov made the remarks in Vzglyad on Friday, February 19, 2010, and they were translated or paraphrased by the USG Open Source Center:

Makarov also commented on the recent rumors about the possibility of an attack upon Iran by the United States. In his opinion, this would be complete madness on the part of the American military. He said: “Admiral Michael McMullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently said that, in the United States, there is a plan for carrying out strikes against Iran but the United States clearly understands that now, when it is conducting two military campaigns, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, a third campaign against Iran would simply lead to a collapse. It would not be able to withstand the strain.”

Nevertheless, in proportion to the winding down of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, (the plan for) a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the opinion of General Makarov, may again come out to the foreground.

General Makarov, Chief of the General Staff, said: “The consequences of such an attack will be terrible not only for the region but also for us. Iran is our neighbor and we are very carefully following this situation. The leadership of our country is undertaking all measures in order not to allow such a (military) development of events.”

A collapse of the United States? Now that would put a definitive end to the murderous insanity that prevails in this country regardless of the regime in power.

It would also play into the hands of the global elite. They are determined to reduce the once great United States into just another third world backwater where poverty and immiseration reign supreme. Such an economic and military collapse of the world’s last remaining super power would set the stage for a world government long dreamed of by the globalist bankster cartel.

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