Wednesday, July 26, 2017
How Media Spread CIA’s
Sectarian, Anti-Iran ‘Mideast Cold War’ Narrative
A new Vox video (7/17/17) is the latest addition to a media
onslaught that propagates numerous misleading talking points to demonize
Iran—just as the US government, under Donald Trump’s vehemently anti-Iran
administration, is ratcheting up aggression against that country.
The 10-minute film, titled “The Middle East’s Cold War,
Explained,” is a textbook example of how US government propaganda pervades
corporate media. With the help of a former senior government official and CIA
analyst, the Voxvideo articulates a commonplace pro-US, anti-Iran
narrative that portrays the violent conflicts in the Middle East as sectarian
proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
In order to do so, the film grossly downplays US involvement in
the region, treating Saudi Arabia as though it acts independently of the US. It
also fails to ever mention Israel, totally removing one of the most important
players in the Middle East from its “Cold War” narrative.
Vox multimedia producer Sam Ellis likewise constructs a false
equivalence for Iran, depicting it as a kind of Shia Saudi Arabia that is just
as guilty of spreading sectarianism. The video correspondingly exaggerates
Iran’s international influence, which is assumed to be dastardly and malign.
“The Middle East’s Cold War, Explained” made a huge splash. It
garnered nearly half a million views in one day, and was trending as one
of YouTube‘s most-watched videos. It serves as an illustrative case
study of how corporate media not only grossly simplify the ongoing conflicts in
the Middle East, they also effectively act as a mouthpiece for the US
government.
Echoing the CIA
The crux of the video is an interview with a former top US
government official, CIA analyst and think tank apparatchik who has spent years
crafting US policy in the Middle East. Vox presents his deeply
politicized views as unchallenged facts.
Kenneth Pollack, the only person featured in Vox‘s
video, is identified simply as a “former Persian Gulf military analyst, CIA.”
After several years as an Iran/Iraq military analyst at the CIA, Pollack went
on to direct Persian Gulf affairs and Near East and South Asian affairs for the
Clinton administration’s National Security Council. Pollack’s bio at the Brookings
Institution notes “he was the principal working-level official for US policy
toward Iraq, Iran, Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council States at the White
House.”
The man around which the entire video is framed is also a
resident scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute—although Vox does
not disclose this in the video. AEI, a conservative bastion that has received
generous funding from large corporations and the ultra-right Koch brothers,
clearly appreciated Vox‘s work: the think tank posted the video on
its website, and its official YouTube account
even wrote to Vox in the comments, “Thanks for featuring our scholar
Ken Pollack in your video!”
Pollack is also a senior fellow at Brookings, an establishment
friendly think tank that gets generous financial support from US-backed Gulf
regimes. Pollack previously directed Brookings’ prestigious Saban Center for
Middle East Policy, which was named after and funded by Israeli-American
billionaire Haim Saban—who proposed bombing “the living daylights out of”
Iran.
A lifelong anti-Iran hawk, Pollack was one of the most
influential advocates for the illegal US invasion of Iraq, writing in his 2002 book The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq:
The only prudent and realistic
course of action left to the United States is to mount a full-scale invasion of
Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam’s regime and rid the
country of weapons of mass destruction.
His support continued steadfastly throughout the Iraq War, even
when many former champions had become opponents. Pollack penned an op-ed in the New
York Times (7/30/07) in 2007, staunchly defending the US
troop surge and insisting, “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq.”
Ironically, neoliberal pundit Matthew Yglesias—a co-founder
of and senior editor at Vox—criticized Pollack in a 2007 column in
the Los Angeles Times (8/2/07), noting the former CIA analyst was a
key influence in persuading him to support the Iraq War. Yglesias wrote:
Those of us who read Pollack’s
celebrated 2002 book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,
and became convinced as a result that the United States needed to, well, invade
Iraq in order to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s advanced nuclear weapons program
(the one he didn’t actually have) might feel a little too bitter to once again
defer to our betters.
Moreover, while Pollack spent years formulating US policy on
Iran and the broader region, analyzing it for US intelligence and writing
several books on the subject, journalist Philip Weiss noted in a 2006 column
in The Observer(4/28/06) that “Pollack has never been to Iran
and doesn’t speak Persian, [and] has only dribs and drabs of Arabic.” This
crucial detail was only mentioned in an author’s note at the end of Pollack’s
book The Persian Puzzle. “You’d think a book that purports to
explain the ‘Persian Puzzle’ might have offered that disclaimer at the front,”
Weiss quipped.
Without providing any of this context, Vox centers
Pollack’s expertise, extensively quoting him throughout its explainer video to
paint a particular narrative of the Middle East that is, predictably, pro-US
and anti-Iran.
Blaming Sectarianism
Vox‘s video expertly reflects the CIA’s perspective of Iran, first
and foremost by regurgitating a popular yet false talking point: The violent
conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia,
and part of a larger new Cold War.
Ubiquitous in US media, this narrative is misleading for two
primary reasons: These wars are not all proxy conflicts, and Saudi Arabia is
not acting independently of the US.
Yemen is a great example of just how false this narrative
is. Vox casually states in the video that the conflict in this
impoverished country is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, even going
so far as to call Yemen’s Houthis “an Iranian proxy.” This is an outrageous
propaganda point used by the US and Saudi Arabia.
Even the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace—which gets
significant funding from the US and British
governments—has published research acknowledging that “Iranian support for the
Houthis has been marginal and does not shape their decisionmaking as much as
local alliances and conflict dynamics do,” and that “claims of Iran’s influence
over the Houthis have been overblown.”
According to the US government narrative peddled by Vox and
virtually all corporate media, the Houthis are “Iran-backed” “Shia rebels.” Yet
the Carnegie report, titled “Iran’s Small Hand in Yemen,” criticizes this
sectarian language used about the war in Yemen, noting the Houthis, who are
Zaidi Muslims, are theologically closer to Sunnis than they
are to Twelver Shiites, the dominant tendency in Iran.
In fact, the word “Shia” was not even used to refer to Yemenis
until the 2011 Middle East uprisings—when the sectarian narrative was
weaponized. Ansar Allah, the official name of the Houthi movement, is an
organic group that was founded in Yemen in the 1990s.
The framing of the conflict in Yemen as an Iran/Saudi Arabia
proxy war, as Vox does so lazily, is a US government narrative
that has been imposed after the fact.
The reality is the war in Yemen is a foreign war on Yemen,
carried out by the US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Britain and several other countries,
which have desperately tried to restore an unpopular leader, Abdrabbu Mansour
Hadi, who won an “election” in 2012 with no other candidates, illegally overstayed his
term in office and then officially stepped down before he fled to Saudi Arabia
for protection.
With planes, bombs, weapons, ammunition, fuel and military
intelligence from the US and Britain—along with foot soldiers from several
other countries (including even mercenaries from Colombia)—Saudi Arabia has
waged a relentless war inside Yemen, launching more than 90,000 air sorties,
incessantly bombing civilian areas, killing thousands of innocents. At most,
Iran may have provided some small guns—and even that is contested. Vox,
however, falsely portrays this as a proxy war in which Saudi Arabia and Iran
supposedly bear equal responsibility.
Creating a False Equivalence
At the heart of the US government narrative echoed by Vox—and
by most US corporate media—is the notion that Iran is merely the Shia Saudi
Arabia, that Iran is just as sectarian as Saudi Arabia, that both states
are ultimately sectarian reflections of each other.
This false equivalence glosses over the fact that Iran’s
government, although Shia, has allied with numerous Sunni forces. In fact, Iran
is regularly attacked by Western governments over its support for Hamas, the
Sunni Islamist political group in the besieged Gaza Strip. Iran has in general
been one of the only states to consistently support Palestinian militant groups
resisting illegal Israeli military occupation and colonization, and nearly all
Palestinian Muslims are Sunni. (Although, again, Israel is never mentioned
in Vox‘s video.)
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also recently spoken out in
support of Muslims in Kashmir, the vast majority of whom are Sunni.
And Iran has pressured the United Nations to take international action to
protect the rights of the Rohingya, a primarily Sunni minority facing
genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
While Iran’s Shia government certainly has sectarian tendencies
and has discriminated against religious minorities, there is no comparison to
the extreme sectarianism of Saudi Arabia’s state doctrine of Wahhabism, a
fundamentalist ideology that considers Shia to be non-Muslim apostates, and
that is shared by genocidal militias like ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Government documents have acknowledged that US client Saudi
Arabia has supported ISIS and Al Qaeda. The so-called Islamic State even
used official Saudi state textbooks to brainwash
children in its capital Raqqa. All of ISIS’s judges in Raqqa were Saudi, and based their draconian system on
Saudi-style policies.
Moreover, Saudi state clerics often go on television and call for genocide of Shia and other
religious minority groups. Seeing these explicit incitements to genocide is not
at all uncommon in Saudi Arabia (as well as in the US-backed regimes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). Shia
clerics in Iran do nothing remotely close to this.
Politically, this false equivalence is even less accurate. Iran
is a theocracy with autocratic elements, by no means a progressive model that
leftists would want to emulate. But in contrast to Saudi Arabia, Iran is a
republic that just held a presidential election with an impressive 73 percent
voter turnout, in which a popular reformist politician, Hassan Rouhani, was
re-elected in a landslide. Women and religious and ethnic minorities in Iran do
indeed face various forms of structural oppression, but the government is also
consistently reforming, and Rouhani has pledged to continue moving forward.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is an extremist absolute
monarchy that is tightly controlled by the royal family, and that bans women
from traveling and making major life decisions without the consent of a male
guardian. The Saudi monarchy has made no serious indications that it is
planning on significantly reforming, despite some PR rhetoric and cynical
op-eds in major US newspapers to the contrary (FAIR.org, 4/28/17).
Yet this false equivalence between Iran and Saudi Arabia has
several useful effects: It exaggerates the sectarianism of Iran while
minimizing the US-backed fundamentalist sectarianism of Saudi Arabia that is
fueling Salafi-jihadist groups throughout the world. And it obfuscates the
complexity of the wars in the Middle East.
Misrepresenting Wars
Vox‘s risible portrayal of the Iraq War is another great example of
this false equivalence. Producer Sam Ellis depicts the aftermath of the illegal
2003 US invasion as a sectarian proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, noting
that each side supported militias—Shia and Sunni, respectively.
What Vox doesn’t mention is that most Iraqis
are Shia, and that many of those “Shia militias” were in fact linked to the Iraqi
government—given the US had entirely dissolved Iraq’s non-sectarian army and
effectively dismantled the government through its unilateral policy of
De-Ba’athification (facts Vox also fails to include).
Vox likewise depicts Iraq’s “Shia militias” as politically
equivalent to the “Sunni militias,” while failing to point out that some of the
latter, who enjoyed support from Saudi Wahhabi authorities, were
fighters in Al Qaeda in Iraq or Salafi groups linked to AQI, which later
metastasized into ISIS.
In the same vein, the Vox video describes the
Lebanese militia Hezbollah simply as an “extremist group,” the implication
being that it is in some way similar to Salafi extremist groups like ISIS and
Al Qaeda, which frequently intentionally massacre civilians. Unlike them,
however, Hezbollah rarely targets civilians, and instead goes after military and police targets, typically from
the US and Israel. Moreover, Hezbollah has recruited Sunnis, Christians and Druze to
fight ISIS and Al Qaeda.
The video’s treatment of Bahrain is just as misleading. Vox says,
“In Bahrain, Iran supported Shia leaders seeking to overthrow the government.
Saudi Arabia in turn sent troops to help quash the unrest.” What Vox again
fails to report is that the vast majority of the population in Bahrain is Shia,
so of course the protesters are largely Shia. On the other hand,
the Khalifas, the extremely repressive Bahraini royal family that is
propped up by the US and Saudi Arabia, are from the minority Sunni community,
and discriminate against the Shia majority.
Similarly, Vox depicts the war in Syria as a
conflict in which both Saudi Arabia and Iran share equal responsibility.
Compared to Yemen and Iraq, Syria is indeed more of an actual sectarian proxy
war. But this is largely because the armed opposition to the Syrian
government—backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—is dominated by
extremist Salafi-jihadist groups that have threatened genocide against Syria’s
religious minorities.
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is Alawite—an offshoot of Shia
Islam—and religious minorities are indeed disproportionately represented in the
government. Yet, on the other hand, the majority of the Syrian Arab Army is
Sunni, as are many state officials. Syria’s government is religiously
pluralist.
Moreover, the war in Syria was not an offensive war for Iran.
Iran was not trying to replace Syria’s government; it was trying to preserve
it. It is the US and Saudi Arabia that spent years trying to overthrow Syria’s
government in an offensive war. Iran was already allied with the Syrian
government before the violence even began.
By creating this overly simplistic polar inversion,
nevertheless, in which Iran is the Shia Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia is the
Sunni Iran, media outlets can gloss over any complicating factors.
“Neither the government of Saudi Arabia nor the government of
Iran are looking for a fight,” Kenneth Pollack insists in the Vox video.
Yet Saudi Arabia was indeed looking for a fight when it spent years trying
desperately to overthrow Syria’s government.
Pollack likewise claims the Saudis “are the ultimate status quo
power. They want the region stable, and they don’t want anybody rising up and
overthrowing a sclerotic autocratic government.” Whereas, he adds, “The
Iranians are the ultimate anti–status quo power.” This, again, is categorically
false. Saudi Arabia has played a key role fueling the wars in Syria and Yemen,
the bloodiest of the Middle East conflicts.
Saudi Arabia and Iran—like all other countries in the world—are
only interested in preserving the status quo when it benefits them. Thus far,
the US-dominated status quote in the Middle East has benefited Saudi Arabia.
But that status quo has been changing since the US invasion of Iraq.
Downplaying US Involvement
Vox is far from alone in peddling these myths. In an article
in AlterNet (7/17/17), FAIR analyst Adam Johnson dissected
a New York Times article (7/15/17) that rewrote the history of the Iraq
War in order to paint Iran as a malevolent villain. This plays into US war
hawks’ favorite sectarian narrative of the “Shiite Crescent” Iran is supposedly
constructing in the Middle East—a narrative that emerged around the time
Hezbollah defeated Israel in its 2006 war in Lebanon.
All of this highlights another misleading point in the “Middle
East’s cold war” framework: this cold war is not just between Saudi Arabia and
the Iran; it is between the US and Iran. This reporting by Vox and
the New York Times overlooks the fact that Saudi Arabia does very
little independently of the US, of which it is effectively a proxy.
Saudi Arabia is politically a rather weak state. It has enormous
oil reserves that have kept it afloat economically, but it has never developed
a significant independent political and military apparatus.
On paper, the Saudi military is very large, with hundreds of
thousands of personnel and with a staggering one-quarter of the regime’s budget
going toward funding it. But the Saudi military has little experience, and has
seen ghastly results in the few military operations it has participated in.
In Yemen, for instance, the Saudi military is relying on US and
UK planes, weapons, bombs, ammunition, fuel, intelligence and training.
American and British military official have physically been in the command room advising the
Saudis. The Saudi military is effectively an outsourcing or extension of
the US military; Saudi Arabia can be seen as a kind of Western protectorate.
Saudi Arabia did $112 billion in arms deals with the Obama
administration, and President Trump has claimed he will sell them another $110
billion in weapons. Yet, while the Saudi military has vastly outgunned the
Houthis and allied forces loyal to ousted Yemeni leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, it
has made little progress. For months, the Saudi military, with huge support
from the US and UAE, has gained little ground, killing thousands of civilians
in order to effectively maintain a stalemate.
Vox and most media reporting on Yemen ignore the fact that, as
the New York Times editorial board (8/17/16) once surprisingly acknowledged,
“Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its
support.” Or, as Foreign Policy (3/14/16) put it, “None of the raids [in Yemen]
could happen without direct US support.”
Similarly, in Syria, Saudi Arabia worked hand-in-hand with the
US, spending billions of dollars to support the US-led training program. Saudi
Arabia was not acting alone. The deal was the Saudi monarchy would provide the money, while the CIA did the dirty
work.
The narrative peddled by Vox and many corporate
media outlets would have us think otherwise—that Saudi Arabia intervened in
Syria, while the US played a minor supplementary role (FAIR.org, 9/5/15, 4/7/17). But the reality is the
opposite: Washington was in charge, not Riyadh.
Echoing the CIA perspective, nevertheless, Vox and
other corporate media present Saudi Arabia as an independent actor. This allows
them to maintain a nationalist, exceptionalist view of the United States, as a
nation that might have problems but ultimately is a benevolent actor, fighting
for freedom and democracy. From this perspective, the US has to sometimes dirty
its hands by supporting dubious allies like Saudi Arabia, in order to
counterbalance big baddies like Iran. But it is Saudi Arabia that is ultimately
the morally questionable actor in this view, not the benevolent US. If the
problems in the Middle East are presented as mainly internal ones, between
Saudi Arabia and Iran, Western imperial intervention is only incidental.
Telling History Selectively
In its historical overview of the conflicts in the Middle
East, Vox‘s video echoes this same US government perspective.
Accordingly, in Vox‘s telling of the history, the trouble all began
with the Iranian Revolution.
In order to explain the 1979 revolution, Kenneth Pollack tells
viewers the Shah of Iran did not have “the same legitimacy and affection that
the Saudi people felt toward their monarchy.” This phrase is loaded with
baseless presuppositions, namely that the Saudi people do indeed feel affection
toward their brutal absolute monarchy, yet alone the notion that this supposed
love—and not the US military—is what keeps it in power. But this also, again,
glosses over the crucial factor of Western empire.
Vox paints the Iranian Revolution as an Islamist backlash
against the Shah’s secular, pro-Western reforms. The reality is much more
complex. The Iranian Revolution was fundamentally an uprising against US
imperialism (a concept corporate media studiously avoid in their Middle East
“explainers”), and there were different tendencies within it. The Islamist
elements ultimately came out on top, but there were also revolutionary Marxist
elements involved, united in their collective opposition to foreign domination.
(Many of the leftist revolutionaries were however later violently purged by the
Islamists.)
To its credit, Vox‘s video does acknowledge that, in
1953, the US staged a coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad
Mosaddegh—although Vox does not mention that Mosaddegh was
democratically elected.
But Vox, like many US media, still depicts the
revolution as the source of the region’s woes: “The rise of Iran as a regional
power threatened other neighboring countries,” Vox‘s narrator
states.
In this perspective, it was Iran doing the “threatening.” But
the video then immediately proceeds to report that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein,
invaded Iran in 1980.
Vox‘s discussion of the subsequent Iran/Iraq War is correspondingly
misleading. The video does not mention that the US supported Saddam Hussein in his
merciless war against Iran, even as he carried out heinous chemical weapons
attacks.
It does, however, note: “When Iran started winning, the Saudis
panicked, and came to Iraq’s rescue. They provided money, weapons and
logistical help.” Once more, Vox conspicuously avoids
mentioning US intervention. Where did Saudi Arabia get the weapons it gave to
Iraq? The US looked the other way as Saudi Arabia
shipped US-made weapons to Iraq in violation of rules against third-party
transfers.
It is Iran that is depicted as a threat, even though it was the
country that was invaded by a US-backed dictator, who then waged an exceedingly
bloody eight-year war.
After the Iran/Iraq War, Vox‘s video then says,
“Fast forward 15 years”—totally omitting the Gulf War and the genocidal US-led UN sanctions against
Iraq.
Hyping the Iran ‘Threat’
Portraying Iran as the regional threat ever since its revolution
is ultimately the effect of media reporting like this. It shields the US
government from fundamental critiques, and shifts the blame onto proxies like
Saudi Arabia and, more so, Official Enemies like Iran.
Vox does not just frame its film around a former CIA analyst.
It even cites a 1980 CIA report that warns of Iran’s international meddling, of
the “threat” of the country “exporting its revolution.”
But Vox‘s video is also a form of more sophisticated
propaganda. Instead of directly articulating neoconservative talking points and
openly calling for regime change in Iran, it portrays Iran as one side in a
“Cold War,” with Iran supposedly escalating aggression against Saudi Arabia,
not the other way around.
The decades of efforts the US has pursued in trying to topple
Iran—the heart of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—are erased. The crippling
sanctions the US has imposed on Iran, which continue to increase, are
overlooked.
Vox portrays itself as a voice of the “resistance” against far-right US President
Donald Trump. Yet, on issues of foreign policy, it fails to even pretend to
buck the trend.
Liberal media in general have been derelict in their duty to
hold the US government responsible vis-à-vis war. In fact, when it comes to
Trump’s most destructive, warmongering policies, corporate media have almost
universally echoed the bipartisan consensus, even actively applauding (FAIR.org, 4/11/17).
Instead of challenging and informing the public, corporate media
speak directly from the perspective of the CIA, and act as handmaidens to
empire.
© 2017
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
Ben Norton is
a journalist and writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @BenjaminNorton
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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