In the desperate bi-partisan neoliberal/neoconservative foreign policy goal to demonize everything Iran, the Illustrious and Serious Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta has taken up a crazy right-wing meme that Iran is spreading its “terrorism” to South America.
“We always have a concern about in particular the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and [their] efforts . . . to expand their influence not only throughout the Middle East but into [South America] as well,” Panetta told reporters Monday.
“That, in my book, that relates to expanding terrorism. And that’s one of the areas that I think all of us are concerned about,” he added.
As Brando said in Apocalypse Now:
The Irony, the Irony.
The irony is lost on Serious People like Leon Panetta. As Glenn Greenwald rightfully observes:
Both the inanity and irony of this are so glaring as to be virtually self-evident. First there’s the fact that the U.S. has been “expanding its circle of influence” in Iran’s immediate vicinity — and in Iran itself — for roughly six decades now; indeed, the U.S., right this moment, has Iran almost entirely encircled militarily. For Iran to do anything comparable, it would have to not merely establish relationships with a few isolated South American governments, but would have to militarily occupy Canada and Mexico for more than a decade with a couple hundred thousand Revolutionary Guard troops, then station a huge naval fleet off the U.S. coast near, say, Cuba, and then target U.S. facilities with cyber-attacks and drone surveillance.
Quite frankly America's do anything, say anything policy vis a vis Iran in order to appease its hysterical right-wing client in the Middle East to demonize and enemy-ize The Islamic Republic of Iran just makes us look stupid. Iran has a nuke on the workbench and terrorists infiltrating Mexican drug cartels and hiding under the bed of
Hugo Chavez.
The fact the United States of America is the greatest purveyor or “terror” in the world, with over 700 military installations in almost every country on the globe; who drones, bombs, assassinates, destroys and devastates where it wants, how it wants, when it wants is completely lost on Serious People who know what's best for our security and safety.
But no, no, no – Iran, big mean Iran, with the beady-eyed Ahmadinejad and the crazy Ayatollahs with their imperial ambitions to take over the world are the real threat.
Oh yeah, they conspired with Mexican Drug Cartels to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. Just par for the course in the hysterical machinations of the paranoid and ridiculous. Never mind it's the U.S. who has been arming Drug Cartels, and stomping around Latin and South America for the better part of a century “the Halls of Montezuma” pillaging and stealing and oppressing the poor people there. Never mind all that: The Iranians are coming, the Iranians are coming! Forget America wages illegal, immoral and irresponsible wars every second of every day. Forget THE TRUTH.
Let's just make shit up, throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Just like Iraq. WMDs? No. Secret Al Qaeda meetings? No. Reconstituted nuclear weapons program? No. Uh, okay, uh, Saddam is a meany? Okay, that sticks let's go to war.
And now we are warring in so many places you can't count them on the fingers of both hands.
But Iran is making friends and influencing people in the same place we have been fucking people over for a century and they're the bad guys?
You know what I say?
Just fucking enough already.