Representatives of Iran and the six world powers attend first round of talks in Geneva, Switzerland, on October 15, 2013.
Sat Nov 9, 2013 7:29AM GMTBy Finian Cunningham
If a diplomatic breakthrough comes from the Geneva talks between Iran and the six world powers, known as the P5+1, it will be largely down to Iranian wisdom and tenacity in facilitating a possible peaceful way out of the Western-imposed nuclear deadlock.
This deadlock over the past decade has inflicted suffering on untold numbers of Iran’s 80-million civilian population through barbaric Western economic sanctions. It has seen countless threats of military attack on Iran issued by the United States. And the deadlock has also been punctuated with Western-backed covert terrorism on Iran, including the assassination of Iranian scientists.
Yet, despite all this criminality, provocation and aggression, the Iranian people have not been bowed. The irony is that it is the Iranians who are creating a peaceful alternative in the face of Western belligerence.
In that case, Iran’s 10,000-year-old Persian culture will have civilized the warmongering instincts of its opponents - the United States, Britain, France and Germany in particular.
These Western states are perhaps the most aggressive and destructive that the world has ever known, inciting countless wars and causing the deaths of tens of millions people to satisfy their imperialist ambitions. In addition to their wars, these Western states have enslaved many more millions of human beings over hundreds of years through capitalist oppression and exploitation.
By contrast, Iran has been at peace with its neighbors for hundreds of years.
It is both risible and insulting of intelligence to read the tone of Western media coverage of the latest Geneva negotiations between Iran and the coterie of powers that self-appoints itself as the “international community.”
“Western diplomats have detected a change of attitude from Iran,” read one report. How do you like that: a change of attitude? The inference in the Western official narrative is always that Iran is the belligerent party and the one who is a threat to world peace.
It is incredible that such a feat of doublethink and distortion can be perpetrated and accepted when the historical record clearly shows that war, death and destruction are the prerogatives of the Western powers.
It is Iran that is the peaceful nation, and yet it is the one that is being treated like a criminal pariah.
Leave aside the centuries of colonial carnage inflicted by Britain, France and Germany across the entire globe, let’s just focus on the United States. This is because the conceited delusion of the US, known as “American exceptionalism,” presumes that it is not an imperialist predator and that it is the world’s savior for democracy.
As Solomon Commissiong pointed out in a recent article for Black Agenda Report, since the birth of the United States, from 1776 to the present, that country has been at war or engaged in covert conflict for 216 years of its 237-year existence. That means that for more than 90 per cent of its lifetime as a state, the US has been waging wars, destroying and killing.
“The US has never gone a decade without being engaged in some sort of military conflict,” notes Commissiong.
Historian William Blum estimates that the US has been involved in more than 60 wars, overt and covert, during that period. That is a belligerence rate of one war for every year. Or put it another way, the US is constantly at war with the rest of the world.
The human casualties for American aggression over the decades since WWII amount to at least 25 million. These victims are located in every continent on earth. What makes the US killing machine so frightening is that its rulers and many of its people are deluded in not being aware of this abhorrent panorama.
Iran’s maligned reputation as a “sponsor of international terrorism” is a function of the same Western propaganda indoctrination, which turns reality on its head and whitewashes the bloodstained hands of Western governments. The propaganda fabrication against Iran is owed simply to the fact that Iran has vehemently condemned imperialism and terrorism, which is actually carried out by the US and its allies, in particular the Zionist regime.
FC/HN