Wednesday, January 4, 2012

7 Reasons Why Iran in 2012 is Nothing at All Like Iraq in 2003

I’ve read a lot lately about the current situation in Iran being a lot like the situation in Iraq in 2003. Sure, America is once again threatening war against a middle eastern, Arab, Muslim, oil producing country, but you if you look deeper, you’ll find the real differences. To prove it, here are 7 reasons why Iran in 2012 is nothing at all like in Iraq in 2003:

1.   Terminology

In Iraq, America accused Iraq of attempting to create weapons of mass destruction. In Iran, they are accusing them of trying to producing nuclear weapons. Obviously, these are completely different things.

2.   Role of the UN

In 2003, the US declared that Iraq was developing weapons, and the UN sent an inspector – who reported that he couldn’t find any evidence. In 2011, the US got much smarter. Rather than making claims contradictory to a UN inspector, they just got someone sympathetic to their cause elected to the head of the IAEA (thank you Bradley Manning – allegedly - for producing the diplomatic cables showing this!), and had him write a report on old information that came to completely new conclusions.

3.   George W Bush vs Barrack Obama

One of them is a warmonger and corporate apologist who gave himself (and all future presidents) the right to imprison anyone, anywhere in the world without due process. The other probably can’t spell either Iraq or Iran.

4.   Supporters

In 2003, the US had the support of Britain. In 2011, Canada and Israel are their main wingmen. This time, they have two foolish ‘friends’ supporting them, not just one (although, one must wonder who is being friends to whom in the case of Israel). Again, they learned from their mistakes and realized that two is better than one.

5.   Iraqis vs Iranians

After the invasion of Iraq, it became clear that the Iraqi people were not happy with their American liberators. It isn’t clear why, but surely Iran would welcome democracy with open arms – after all there have been pro-democracy protesters in Iran over the past few years. Assumedly, this means Iranians would be thrilled when American come and brought Democracy with them.

6.   Link to Al-Qaeda

In 2003, America tried to draw a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Probably because the link was shown to be unquestionably false, they didn’t bother trying to draw the same link between Iran and a terrorist group. (Hey, it still counts as a difference – it isn’t easy coming up with 7, you know).

7.   Oil

Wait, no they are both major oil producing nations, scratch that one.

7.   Iraq was on America’s list of ‘regime change’ targets

Nope, that one too – they were both on the list of countries that American neo-cons (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz , among others) under George W. Bush wanted to invade and impose government changes.

7.   Culture

Hmmm, both Arabic countries, is the fact that they speak a different language enough?

7.   Religion

Never mind, further research shows them to be both predominately Muslim countries.

7.   They aren’t spelled the same

I-R-A-Q is not the same as I-R-A-N. Knew that I’d find one more.

It wasn’t easy, but I did manage to find 7 ways in which these two situations are completely different – just don’t ask me to come up with 8. Can we please now accept the fact that these are two completely different situations and just get on with the invasion, and subsequent destruction of Iran, along with the 7 years of civil war that will inevitably follow (and the hundreds of thousands of civilian lives that will be lost), so that a non-existent threat can be extinguished?

Interesting Related Articles:


  • Canadian Progressive World has an interesting video on how corporate media manipulates support for international wars, going back as far as the Spanish-American war, and continuing through World War 1, Vietnam and Iraq and how this manipulation is supporting escalating the situation in Iran.

2 comments:

  1. How many hours did this post take you? :) War is essentially the same, right? Always just different faces all around.

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  2. Not as long as you might think - I really didn't look too hard for differences, since I know there aren't many.

    I agree, all wars are essentially the same. Unfortunately, there are those who claim that there are 'good' wars and 'bad' wars. Most people realize that Iraq was a 'bad' war, but now the war mongers are trying to convince us that Iran would be a 'good' war - even though the pretense is exactly the same.

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