John Chuckman
SERIES OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS (SOME REMOVED)
“U.S. to end exemptions on Iranian oil sanctions for 5 nations, including China
“China, Japan, South Korea, India and Turkey had previously been allowed to keep importing, but no more”
Here are arrogant men trying to control what they call American foreign policy, deciding who may buy and sell things across an entire planet.
Some dedication to human freedom, freedom of speech and choice and commerce. To say nothing of contempt for the rule of law in attempting to apply American law to all countries on earth.
Can you imagine the manpower committed to this lunatic sanction enterprise, those keeping track of the thousands of arbitrary sanctions set against any number of countries? Literally, an American Bureaucracy of Apparatchiks.
Just unbelievable. Meanwhile, the same men have sold blood-soaked Saudi Arabia tens of billions in armaments.
And the same men bomb a dozen lands, make constant new threats, create piteous masses of refugees, overturn governments, and just generally try telling everyone what to do.
They support human freedom and democratic ideals nowhere that I can see, including at home, where spying on everyone and working to restrict free speech have become norms, along with repressive and brutal police tactics.
They are, by far, the world's largest weapons merchant, spreading still more death and destruction.
They are, by a huge measure, the planet’s biggest investor in death. Their combined military and security budget is greater than those of all other major countries, and they now burn through about a trillion dollars a year.
And that from a country with $22 trillion in accumulated debt? Talk about irresponsible. How are they fit to tell anyone else what to do? They are not. Their financial behavior alone endangers the futures of us all.
They are now publicly committed to spreading belligerence into space, a place they once pretended wanting to keep peaceful.
And poor dear old Canada has the team of Trudeau and Freeland not only going along with every bit of it but actively supporting and cheerleading substantial portions.
I'm sure, Pierre's spirit does not rest comfortably with that.
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Response to a comment about the American coup in Iran which destroyed democratic government and created the situation now:
Intelligence services have a word for such results.
It's called "blowback."
They've experienced it in other places, too, such as Afghanistan.
But they really do not seem to learn.
That's the nature of ideologues, like the folks running America.
They are just like religious fanatics. They never learn either.
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Response to a comment referring to the difficulties of democratic government:
Where do you see democracy?
America has a minority president.
And it is often said that it has the finest Congress money can buy.
In Canada, governments rule having the support of a high-thirties per cent of voters.
Regularly.
The British Parliament works exactly the same way.
That's why we needed the vote reform Trudeau so let us down on.
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Response to a comment about people defending Iran in the comments here:
That's a mischaracterization of what I read here and what I write.
No one said anything about Iran as a "bastion of freedom."
That's actually what’s called a red herring or straw man argument in logic.
The Iranians mind their own business for the most part. Also, Iran has started no wars, not one. The United States starts them all the time, as does Israel.
Indeed, Iran has been, instead, attacked several times, including the major, horrible war of the 1980s started by Saddam's Iraq with lots of American encouragement and assistance.
And there is only one country in the Middle East with genuine illicit nuclear weapons, not make-believe ones. Can you guess which one? Here's hint, it isn't Iran.
And the United States in fact loves tyrants and dictators in the Mideast, as in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, etc. That is, so long as they are ones who toe the American policy line. They keep the people suppressed. Israel very much appreciates that too.
But a single world dictator is surely the worst of all possibilities, and that's what the US works towards now vigorously. It's our greatest threat to peace and freedom and fairness.
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Response to a comment about religion causing these problems:
Religion is often cited as the cause of the Mideast’s turmoil, but I think it actually plays a rather small role.
In reality, power politics and geopolitical drives control international affairs. Religion is just a convenient cover. Almost used as a kind of disinformation item in the West.
The United States sees Israel as its pied-a-terre in the Middle East.
Effectively a kind of colony, a colony quite different than any other.
It is kept afloat by immense subsidies, unlike any other situation we can find in the world.
The closest comparison might be France and Algeria before de Gaulle.
Algeria was viewed for a very long time literally as a part of France.
The final break-up was extremely bloody and dirty.
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Response to another reader comment:
That's exactly the case.
The United States so resented Iran that it secretly encouraged and assisted a huge and terrible war against it in the 1980s.
Why did it so hate Iran? Because Iran resented the bloody, torture-employing Shah installed by the United States in the 1950s after a coup toppled the country’s genuinely democratic president, a man hated by Western oil interests.
The pressures in Iran rose to fever pitch and the revolution was the result. When the creepy Shah fled Iran for American protection, people only became angrier. Iranians embarrassed the United States by patiently piecing together numbers of shredded embassy secret documents – the remarkable work of Iranian carpet weavers – documents which were very revealing about American manipulation.
America resented losing Iran as its important foothold in the region. The Shah was America’s man there, and he was encouraged to buy large volumes of American weapons with his oil revenue, much as we see happening in Saudi Arabia today.
America’s government has never forgiven Iran, and today, Israel's pleas for overturning Iran only add pressure. Israel, a nuclear power, is not really threatened by Iran as it pretends to be, but Israel does not want this huge country to be a competitor in the region for influence. It wants to be the key regional power, serving the US and reaping many benefits.
And the United States did more than just encourage Saddam. It saw to it that Iraq was supplied with chemical weapons so that it might overcome Iran's huge manpower advantage of nearly four-to-one.
Saddam used these chemical weapons, horribly killing tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers caught not expecting such things. No one in the United States said one word against the atrocities. America’s elites were pleased with the results of bleeding and weakening Iran.
The war was literally the equivalent of a world war for Iran with loss of about a million people.
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Response to a comment complaining about the anti-American tone of many comments:
In case you hadn't noticed, in most societies, there is dislike for bullies, dislike for would-be dictators, dislike for killers, and dislike for liars.
It has nothing to do with Canadians in particular.
Remember, the United States, which is ramming all this down everyone's throat, represents less than 5 percent of the world's population.
Very democratic in spirit, right?
The same less-than 5 percent has eviscerated parts of the UN, the ICC, the WTO, and many other international forums from which the other 95 percent of humanity might get to speak.
Actually, of course, it really isn't America's 5 percent or so of the globe doing all this. It's the very privileged American power establishment, something like the 1 per cent of its own nation.
Ordinary Americans have virtually no say. And their Congress has been, rightly, described as the best that money can buy.
