The International Writers Magazine: A little James Campion critique

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American Intervention and the Middle-East • Brian Appleton I just read a year old commentary by James Campion about the Iran "crisis." I only agree with his cynicism towards the motivations and propoganda of the current US administration.

I think that it does Iranians a grave disservice to dismiss their 70 million population as Islamic fanatic madmen who Israel could take out without a problem. I do not find his cavalier treatment of the prospect of war and mass death charming or erudite. The IRI is no more representative of the people of Iran than the Bush administration is of the majority of Americans.

If the big mouthed American government had been there in 1979 to support the "Iranian Spring" which was a brief period of secular democracy and freedom of the press and assembly and to form political parties before Khomeini arrived then I believe Iran would have had a very different fate rather than the agony its people have been put through for the past 28 years by the theocratic fascists and their thug basij morality police. I was there during that spring time when papers which had been censored out of existence under the Shah flourished once more after 40 years of silence.
 
The American government and military industrial complex have a hard-on for Iran because they lost so much business when their puppet the Shah was sent packing by the PM Shahrpour Bakhtiar. The era of the Pahlavis served the US interests well even though its Savak violated human rights on a constant basis but who cares, they are just brown people right? Like the 665,000 Iraqis who have purportedly died so far in this latest military adventure...
 
The reason that the IRI has survived 28 years so far is that the European powers are so hungry for oil that they do not care who is in power and with all the deals they have cut with the IRI they have a vested interest in seeing that it stays.
 
I do not take any comfort at all in Israel's vast missile arsenal and atomic bombs.They are not members of the Non Proliferation Treaty and Iran is!?! Israel has not fostered peace in the region but has exascerbated the danger by building settlements on Palestian land, by shelling Lebanon and other acts of organized state sanctioned terror.
 
The real source of instability in the Middle East is the vast inequality in the distribution of wealth where the countries with the tiniest populations flaunt their wealth in obscene extravagance like in Dubai, while countries with the bulk of the population of the region like Egypt have very low per capita annual income and lots of poverty and unemployment.
 
Ironically Iraq under CIA appointee Saddam had one of the highest standards of living in the region and the lowest illiteracy and it offered employment to the many unemployed in Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. Now it has the lowest standard of living in the region after US "intervention."
 
The problem of inequitable distribution of wealth is too big to just take a hammer to it and declaring a "war on terrorism" isn't going to fix it either. "Islamic fanaticism" is just another smoke screen to cover over this fact.
 
Isn't it an amazing feat of propoganda that the world fears Iran when they have not invaded nor bombed anyone and in fact the US administration has started two opportunistic wars of aggression and has created the largest national debt in our history by committing our resources to high altitude bombing. Has our military budget done one thing to improve our trade deficit with Japan and China?
 
In my humble opinion the US needs to stop presenting its military might as its only bargaining chip and start actually doing things to alleviate human misery on a grand scale as it has done in the past, not only with such things as the Marshall Plan, but Truman even had a mini Marshall plan for Iran called:"Point Four" which did so much to improve public health, education and transportation in Iran in the late '40's that most Iranians to this very day love America. I ask you to remember that on 9/11 Iranians in Iran were burning candles and praying for the victims and that Iranian forces helped US forces to get the Taliban out of Power in Afghanistan until Bush made his infamous speech about Iran being one of the Triple Axis of Evil nations.
 
How can anyone talk so glibly about war and Israel nuking people and so on like it's some kind of a cocktail party discourse when one week of 911 gave us a small taste of how other people have been suffering in war torn nations for many decades. There is not an Afghan alive today who has not lost an immediate family member to war.
 
 How would this author feel if his brother or sister or parent had been raped and tortured to death by the CIA trained and equipped SAVAK of the Shah's Iran? Would he not have wanted a revolution and revenge? You see the trouble with being a writer is that it puts you in an armchair and removes you from the front lines of reality as does technology. I am reminded of Mussolini's son talking about how the bombs he was dropping on Ethiopians from the plane he was piloting looked like flowers opening...Haile Selassey appealed to the UN to stop Italy's aggression and no one came to his aid...and he was the heir of David and Solomon...
 
© Brian H. Appleton August 20th 2007
iranianb at sbcglobal.net
Dear readers, please visit my website www.zirzameen.com to learn more about my first book and how to aquire a copy.

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