This piece critiques media hypocrisy, arguing the New York Times paved the way for war by vilifying Iran for decades, like its Iraq WMD cheerleading. The “antiwar” editorial is disingenuous—it justifies strikes while ignoring U.S./Israeli nuclear arsenals.
Shortly after the United States and Israel launched unprecedented strikes on Iran this weekend, blithely propelling the entire region into unfathomable chaos, the editorial board of the New York Times published its two cents’ worth in an editorial directed towards US sociopath-in-chief Donald Trump: “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?”
It’s a valid question, to be sure – particularly given Trump’s previous promise that he wouldn’t entangle the country in unnecessary conflicts abroad.
And yet it is a question that would be far less hypocritically posed by, say, a newspaper that had not once run an opinion piece by John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”.
A few paragraphs into their ostensible antiwar intervention – which was subsequently retitled “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless” – the Times editorial board contended that the president’s “goals are ill-defined”, while he has “failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome”.
Furthermore, the authors noted, Trump has “disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare”.
This sounds kind of like the US war on Iraq in 2003, for which the Times notoriously served as a primary cheerleader, swearing by the US government’s fabricated claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The paper’s eternal foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, went so far as to make the compelling suggestion that Iraqis needed to “suck on this” as compensation for the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, which Friedman himself nonetheless acknowledged Iraq had nothing to do with.
All in a day’s work
Twenty years and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis later, the Times issued a non-apology, lamenting that for many of the nation’s citizens, it was “hard to appreciate the positive developments” that had supposedly followed the US invasion.
Anyway, it was all in a day’s work for the US newspaper of record – which has rarely met an imperial war it didn’t like.
Now, in spite of critiquing Trump’s “reckless” manner of waging war on Iran, the Times editorial board went on to effectively justify that war in principle, specifying that the Iranian “regime has wrought misery since its revolution 47 years ago – on its own people, on its neighbors and around the world”.
Case in point: Iran’s leaders have “proclaimed ‘Death to America’ since coming to power and killed hundreds of U.S. service members in the region”. Never mind the far more severe mass regional slaughter inflicted by the US army and their allies – not to mention the US-backed Israeli genocide that continues to be perpetrated in the Gaza Strip, under the supervision of Trump’s comrade-in-arms, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In superficially pushing back against Trump’s manic warmongering, the Times appears to have forgotten that it has spent the past 47 years or so vilifying the Islamic Republic and paving the war for apocalyptic war.
The paper has been dutifully accompanied in this task by the rest of the western establishment media, nostalgic for the good old days of the torture-happy shah of Iran, whose rule was enabled by the 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence.
As historian Ervand Abhrahamian notes in his book A History of Modern Iran: “Arms dealers joked that the shah devoured their manuals in much the same way as other men read Playboy.”
The shah was such a good friend of the West, in fact, that he was deemed an ideal contender for – what do you know? – his very own nuclear programme.
Retroactive whining
Naturally, such highly relevant history is consistently excised from contemporary western media reports, which prefer to focus with breathless sensationalism on the current Iranian government’s alleged nuclear ambitions – much as they obsessed over Iraq’s alleged possession of WMD.
It bears underscoring that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, assassinated in Saturday’s air strikes, issued a fatwa in the 1990s against the development and use of nuclear weaponry as fundamentally contrary to Islamic principles.
This tidbit of information managed to make it into various mainstream obituaries as an almost inconsequential side note. The Reuters news agency, for example, granted exactly one line to the fatwa under the simultaneously ambiguous and condemnatory headline “Iran’s Ali Khamenei, who based iron rule on fiery hostility to US and Israel, dies at 86”.
While US and British media in particular have devoted years to portraying Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons as a diabolical fact, no such scrutiny is offered to the existing nuclear stockpiles of the two countries that caused Khamenei to, um, “die at 86”.
Apparently, there’s nothing objectionable about a pair of supremely belligerent and straight-up genocidal powers presiding over world-destroying technology.
And as the New York Times whines retroactively about Trump’s “reckless” behaviour in Iran, western establishment media would do well to reflect on the role that years of preemptive journalistic strikes on the country have played in fuelling this bloody mess.