Postby Le Chiffre » Thu Jul 18, 2019 6:31 pm
Noam Chomsky interview July, 2019
Q: I was reminded of Manufacturing Consent recently, while reading headlines about growing tensions between Iran and the United States. This article in the Washington Post is, I think, emblematic of efforts by certain media outlets to misrepresent the conflict by minimizing Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal and framing Iran’s renewed enrichment of uranium as the catalyst for heightened hostilities. Can you explain why this sort of reporting is dangerous, and how critical readers should effectively appraise coverage of international relations in the news media?
NC
The media almost reflexively adopt the basic framework of state doctrine. At the liberal end of the spectrum (the New York Times, Washington Post) they typically soften the edges slightly, yielding the impression of independence. Reporting of the Iran-US tensions is typical of the long-standing pattern, documented to the sky. According to state propaganda, Iran is the guilty party. The United States has to decide whether and how to respond to Iran’s provocations and general malice. The liberal media, in their most critical stance, frame it differently — both sides are increasing tensions.
Reality is dramatically different, and hardly in question. Iran has lived up completely to the stringent terms of the JCPOA (uniquely harsh for a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty). US intelligence and all other credible sources agree. The Trump administration withdrew from the treaty, effectively destroying it, and imposed savage sanctions designed to destroy the economy and punish the population. Iran refrained from any reaction, hoping that the European Union might have the courage to depart from the master’s orders, but when it failed to do so, Iran began to take some steps to restore its nuclear programs — as indeed it is entitled to do under the NPT and once the JCPOA is abrogated. It may or may not have carried out some provocative actions in the Gulf as charged by the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo axis, not famous for their credibility.
All of this is dismissed to the margins.
Unmentionable in the free press is the international Gallup poll that asked which country is the greatest threat to world peace: the United States, no one else even close. Iran barely mentioned — in contradiction to the US mantra, constantly intoned, that Iran is the greatest threat to peace and the United States is of course the world’s leading advocate of peace and democracy.
There is a straightforward way to mitigate or end any imagined Iranian nuclear threat: establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with adequate inspections, such as those that have been carried out in Iran under the JCPOA without interference, as acknowledged. The idea was proposed decades ago by the Arab states. It is strongly supported by Iran, G-77, and virtually every other country, but is regularly vetoed by the United States at the NPT review conferences, most recently by Obama. The reason is scarcely concealed. It would mean acknowledging the existence of Israel’s huge nuclear weapons arsenal — which would render military aid to Israel illegal under US law — and permitting it to be inspected, evidently intolerable. Advocacy of such a policy must therefore be another form of “the real antisemitism.”
An interesting footnote, also under a ban, is that the United States and Britain have a unique obligation to pursue a NWFZ in the Middle East. In seeking to concoct a pretext for invading Iraq they appealed to UN Security Council Resolution 687; they falsely claimed that Iraq had violated by developing nuclear weapons. The only violators of the treaty are the United States and United Kingdom, undermining its call for establishing a NWFZ in the Middle East.
It is becoming somewhat boring to reiterate all of this endlessly to ears that are closed by fanatic loyalty to doctrinal verities. Something Orwell anticipated when he discussed how in free England, “unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force.”
