The Fog of War: Iran Version
John Lawrence, January 12, 2020
Worse than the killing of one Iranian General (along with 10 of his cohorts) and the lobbing of missiles into an American air force base in Iraq (which killed no Americans) was the shooting down of a plane in Tehran with the loss of 176 lives - men, women and children. This was the worst tragedy of this little skirmish between the US and Iran, but it exemplifies the reality that the worst casualties of war are always innocent civilians. It was an accident, but there are always these types of accidents when hostilities dictate that some hostile action be taken to take out one bad guy. Whether or not Qasem Soleimani was a bad guy, the tragedy of the entire situation was the loss of innocent life.
Getting in bed with Saudi Arabia (the killer of Jamal Khashoggi) determines that we must be enemies with Iran because the enemy of my friend is my enemy. Without considering the human rights implications, President Nixon made a deal with the devil in 1971 in order to make the US dollar the world's reserve currency. He allied the US with Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia controlled the world's oil supply at that time. Henceforth, Saudi Arabia would only accept payment for oil in US dollars. This made the US and Saudi Arabia the equivalent of Ugolino della Gherardesca and Archbishop Ruggieri in Dante's Inferno. Ugolino's punishment involves his being entrapped in ice up to his neck in the lowest circle of Hell with his betrayer, Archbishop Ruggieri, who left him to starve to death. Ugolino is constantly gnawing at Ruggieri's skull.
Saudi Arabia is constantly gnawing at the US' neck, figuratively of course. All but one of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen. By contrast Iran or its citizens have never done anything equivalent to the US. True in 1979 they captured fifty-two American diplomats and citizens who were held hostage for 444 days by a group of Iranian college students who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. This was in retaliation for the US supported coup in 1953 which eliminated the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the ruthless Shah of Iran. Again it was all about the oil. Mosaddegh nationalized Iran's oil. The Shah undid that to the delight of the US and British oil interests. Oil has been the cause of much war, and now it is the cause of global warming which is destroying the earth.
Perhaps if the US admitted the fact that it overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran and apologized for that initial sin, things could become a lot better in terms of relations between the two countries. Despite the hostility between the two countries, George W Bush lied the US into war in Iraq which effectively brought Iraq into Iran's sphere of influence because the majority of Iraqis have the same religion as most Iranians - Shiite Islam. All of the treasure and loss of life produced the exact opposite of the outcome the US wanted. War has a way of coming back and slapping the perpetrator in the face. The result of US wars in the Middle East has been to increase Iranian influence there, not the result the US wanted.
The loss of the Ukraine bound plane in Tehran brings to mind another military blunder when in 2004, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was asked about a report that his troops had taken out a wedding party in western Iraq, including the wedding singer and his musicians, killing 43 people, 14 of them children. He responded: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” Figures by the Iraq Body Count project indicate that, from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013, of 174,000 casualties only 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of 77%. War is bad enough for the people doing the actual fighting, but it is many times worse for innocent men, women and children.
