Here’s why the US spreads falsehoods about Iran

Iran is not sponsoring terrorism, but the US has vested interests in perpetuating lies on the matter.

by Eric Zuesse

November 27, 2017, 15:49

While I happened to be researching another subject, a central question in the investigation came to be how Iran — which supplied none of the 9/11 terrorists and no financing to them and no organizing of them, and which hasn’t been connected with nearly as many terrorist incidents globally as Saudi Arabia has — came to be officially called by the U.S. “the top state sponsor of terrorism.” The following is the portion of my resulting article that happens to concern this very question, and it’s modified slightly here, so as to focus only on this exact question:

The lie about this matter began, actually, with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in the Saudi city of Khobar, which killed 19 U.S. military, who worked at the Dharan air base three miles away.

Prior to that incident, I am not able to find any such reference as “Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism” or “Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism” or anything like it.

This incident — the Khobar Towers bombing — became the lynchpin of the accusation by the Saudi royal family, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, that Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Both Robert Mueller and his longtime ally James Comey (the latter of whose firing as the FBI chief, by U.S. President Trump, had sparked the appointment of Mueller to become the Special Counsel investigating the U.S. President) had performed crucial roles in establishing that the Khobar Towers bombing was a Hezbollah operation run by the Iranian Government — and, starting upon this basis, in helping to develop the case that Iran “is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism.” However, as has been made clear by several great independent investigative journalists, on the basis of far more-solid documentation than the official account, the Khobar Towers bombing was instead entirely a fundamentalist-Sunni operation, specifically perpetrated by Al Qaeda, which hates Shia and which also hates America’s military presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden’s claim of the bombing’s having been done by Al Qaeda, was, in fact, entirely honest and accurate.

America’s “Deep State,” which extends to Saudi Arabia and to a number of other Governments — it’s an international network — is deeply committed to supporting the fundamentalist-Sunni war to conquer and destroy Shia Islam, and not merely to conquer the leading Shia nation, which is Iran. The U.S. Government has intensely taken a side in the Sunni-Shia religious war. That war is comparable in some respects to the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648) between Catholics and Protestants, which killed an estimated eight million Europeans; and, both the United States and Israel have clearly joined with the fundamentalist-Sunni leaders, against Iran, and against Shia generally.

The reasons behind the prevailing lies about this matter will also be documented here. Discrepancies between the official story and the solidly documented facts, need to be explained, in order for a reader to be able to understand truthfully why Mueller (who cooperated with Comey in order to rig the official account of the bombing, so as to condemn Iran and Hezbollah instead of Al Qaeda) received his appointment. This is also important in order to understand why Trump, though rabidly anti-Iranian himself, is nonetheless insufficiently anti-Iranian to satisfy the Sauds, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the rest of the U.S.-and-allied Deep State.

Before proceeding further here, however, the statistical falseness of the allegation that Iran is the foremost state-sponsor of terrorism has to be clearly recognized as being the ultimate fact; because, if this entire question — to which Mueller and Comey contributed so importantly to answering by their identifying Iran (and Shia generally) as being precisely that (‘the foremost state sponsor of terrorism’) — can be assessed at all objectively, then the statistical answer to it would certainly be the objective one.

Wikipedia’s article on “Iran and state-sponsored terrorism” says: “According to the Global Terrorism Database, the majority of deaths, more than 94% attributed to Islamic terrorism since 2001, were perpetrated by Sunnijihadists of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and others.[3][4].” Only 6% were Shiites, at all — from any country. Similarly, my own independent study of 54 especially prominent global instances of Islamic terrorism was headlined (and reported that) “All Islamic Terrorism Is Perpetrated by Fundamentalist Sunnis, Except Terrorism Against Israel.” (The anti-Israel terrorist instances might constitute the “6%” which was referred to in the Wikipedia article, but that article provided no good link to its source for the “6%” figure.)

So: the basic allegation is false, that Iran is the foremost state-sponsor of terrorism; the general allegation isn’t anywhere near to being true. It’s a lie. More specifically, now, regarding the Khobar Towers incident, which triggered the start of this fraudulent generalization:

The Saudi royal family asserted, immediately after the bombing, that the attack had been perpetrated by jihadists who had returned from Afghanistan and who were now fighting to overthrow Saudi Arabia’s Government (the royal Saud family).

For example, on 15 August 1996, the New York Times headlined “Saudi Rebels Are Main Suspects In June Bombing of a U.S. Base”, and reported that, “The Government of Saudi Arabia now believes that native Saudi Islamic militants, including many veterans of the Afghan war, carried out the June 25 bombing that killed 19 American servicemen at a base in Dhahran, Saudi officials said today.” However, the “mujahideen” who had fought in Afghanistan were paid and backed both by the Sauds and by the U.S. Government. For example, as early as 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski flew into Pakistan and exhorted the Taliban there to become mujahideen in Afghanistan because “That land over there is yours; you’ll go back to it one day, because your fight will prevail, and you will have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.” Then, starting in 1980, “From the Pakistani border, bin Laden raises funds and provides the mujahedeen with logistical and humanitarian aid.” So, the Sauds’ allegation that the Khobar bombers had been “veterans of the Afghan war” would have meant that they had been foot-soldiers for the U.S.-Saudi operation in Afghanistan. Both the U.S. Government and the Saud family (who own the Saudi Government) hate Shia and especially hate Iran. Hezbollah are Shia, and they are extremely pro-Iran. How likely is it that Hezbollah, anywhere, would have been fighting under the command of Al Qaeda, or of any other fundamentalist-Sunni jihadist organization that calls all Shia “infidels”? So, the Sauds’ account of the Khobar Towers bombing is fishy, at best.

Furthermore, a Google-search for the phrase “Hezbollah in Afghanistan” turns up only “6 results,” and all of them say nothing about any “Hezbollah in Afghanistan.” No report comes up about such a thing, for any year, or any period. The only countries where Hezbollah was reported to exist were Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. One of the links in that Google search was globally comprehensive for the year 2007, the Center on International Cooperation’s “Annual Review of Global Peace Operations — 2007”. It included reports on wars during that year, in 26 countries, and the chapter for Afghanistan (pages 52-58) doesn’t mention Hezbollah even once. However, a search for the phrase ”Hezbollah Afghanistan” does bring up “Syria’s Other Foreign Fighters: Iran’s Afghan and Pakistani Mercenaries”, at the neoconservative (and thus favoring not only the American aristocracy but its allied aristocracies — especially in Saudi Arabia and Israel) The National Interest, dated 20 November 2015. That article says, “The liwa’ fatimiyun (Fatimiyun Brigade) is composed exclusively of Afghans and fights under the auspices of Hezbollah Afghanistan,” based in Syria. Other supposed foreign Shiites trying to overthrow Syria’s Government are mentioned, as being supposedly “Pakistanis fighting in Syria under the Hezbollah flag.” However, if these allegations are true, then those men would be opponents of Syria’s secular government, which is headed by the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad, who is being attacked by fundamentalist Sunnis — including both ISIS and Al Qaeda there — who are trying to kill Hezbollah in Syria, who are, in fact, defending Assad. (Such illogical ‘historical’ accounts as that, are normal in neoconservative publications — counterfactuality is entirely acceptable to them.) Either that, or else the alleged Shiite Pakistanis who are fighting in Syria to overthrow the Shiite Assad and replace him with a fundamentalist Sunni regime, would be — not actually members of Hezbollah, but instead — Shiites from Pakistan who came to Syria in order to help actually not to overthrow the Government but to defend it against its rabidly anti-Shia attackers. That’s the opposite of the assumption that The National Interest made, but it conceivably could be the case. A Pew survey scientifically randomly sampled 1,512 Pakistanis, and found that 1,450 of them declared themselves to be “Muslim,” which is 96%. It also found that 94% of Pakistanis (of any or no faith) say that religion is “very important” in their lives, and found that 81% of the Muslims said they were “Sunni,” 6% said they were “Shiite,” and 12% said they were “Just a Muslim.” So, only 6% of Pakistanis identified themselves specifically as “Shia.” That is such a small percentage of Shiites in Pakistan, as to make unlikely any significant contribution that Pakistanis would be providing to the defense of Syria, which is at least 1,800 miles or 2,900 kilometers, away — not even in the same general region. But, in any case, that neoconservative magazine’s assumptions regarding the entire matter are clearly false.

Clearly, then, the logical feasibility of the U.S. Government’s case against Iran is so tiny as to constitute almost an absolute impossibility of that case being true.

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