Boot On The Ground: Shameless War Hawk Feels the Burns on Vietnam While Calling on Trump to Attack Iran

This is Max Boot, someone no one should ever listen to.

Media analyst (and, full disclosure, my Citations Needed podcast co-host) Adam Johnson has deftly exposed the ubiquitous trope in the American press "that the US military always goes to war reluctantly—and, if there are negative consequences, like civilian deaths, it's simply a matter of bumbling around without much plan or purpose."

This common theme is seen time and again in headlines warning against the United States absent-mindedly or accidentally "sliding," "sleepwalking," "stumbling," being "pulled" or "trapped" or "sucked" or "dragged" or "drawn" into confrontations across the globe, from Syria to Afghanistan to North Korea. A Washington Post headline from August even insisted: "We won't go to war with North Korea on purpose. But we might by accident."

The now commander-in-chief of history's most expansive, expensive and destructive military even leaned on this talking point, in a prescient tweet from 2013:

Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2013

One of the most recent offenders of the "ooops, we might slip into a war" meme is chronic militarist Max Boot, who took to the pages of Foreign Policy last week to suggest Donald Trump tune into the new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary series on Vietnam to educate himself on the consequences of bad decision-making. The piece, using Vietnam as a cautionary tale, is exactly what you'd imagine it to be. Boot frets that Trump is "risking a repeat of one of the mistakes that ensnared America in the Vietnam War," and suggests Trump watch Burns' series "to see what can happen when the U.S. acts too aggressively and thereby stumbles into a ruinous war."

And here's Boot's version of history, with the United States being - as always - both noble and hapless in equal measure:

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson committed himself to defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. At the same time, he authorized a covert campaign known as OPLAN 34A to send South Vietnamese commandos on raids into the North supported by the U.S. military. Johnson had no idea that in so doing he would be goading North Vietnam into a war with the United States. But that is just what happened.

See? Benevolent America is "committed to defending" our allies against enemy "aggression." So, the United States "supports" various military actions. And then - whoopsie! - the U.S. is suddenly at war. How ever did that happen?!

Boot continues to spin his yarn:

One of Johnson’s covert attacks took place at midnight of July 30, 1964, with South Vietnamese naval commandos raiding two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Tonkin while the destroyer USS Maddox was steaming 120 miles away. There was no direct connection between the commando raid and the Maddox’s intelligence-gathering patrol, but the North Vietnamese did not know that. On Aug. 2, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox without doing any damage.

Then on Aug. 4, another North Vietnamese attack was reported on the Maddox and its sister destroyer, the Turner Joy. The two destroyers fired 372 shells and at least four depth charges while reporting that they had dodged multiple torpedoes and enemy gunfire. Yet American pilots overhead could not see any enemy ships. It later became obvious that the second attack had not really happened. But by then Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson a blank check to wage war against North Vietnam. The eventual result: nearly half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam, with 58,000 of them coming home in body bags.

Of course, Boot makes literally no mention of the millions of Vietnamese and others murdered in Southeast Asia by Americans. He also skips over the part where, even at the time, the American leadership wasn't positive anything had actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, not merely "later" on. President Johnson was told at the time, according to Burns' own documentary, that an attack on the Turner Joy was "probable, but not certain." Hardly an authoritative analysis upon which to go to war. Yet, Johnson and his top cabinet secretaries had already prepared a Congressional resolution to increase American military involvement in Vietnam. Journalist I.F. Stone, at the time, was questioning the official narrative of "unprovoked attacks" and "retaliation." And two Senators voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution due to their disbelieving the White House's version of events.

So, warning against escalating rhetoric with North Korea, Boot urges "containment and deterrence" and hope for the rule of Kim Jong-un to eventually simply collapse. He thinks that plan might just work, "as long as we don't stumble into an unnecessary and calamitous conflict first because of our president's macho posturing."

Max Boot, Human Nightmare

Boot's track record of advice is troubling. On October 15, 2001, as the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered in lower Manhattan, Boot took to the pages of Bill Kristol's neocon bellwether The Weekly Standard to advocate for a boundless American imperium.

"The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition," Boot wrote, "the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation." Boot's suggestion: start invading and occupying more Muslim countries. "Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq," he declared. Why? As "a matter of self defense," of course! Saddam Hussein, Boot assured readers, "is currently working to acquire weapons of mass destruction that he or his confederates will unleash against America and our allies if given the chance." And hey, how hard could it be? Boot laid out the plan:

It will probably not be possible to remove Saddam quickly without a U.S. invasion and occupation--though it will hardly require half a million men, since Saddam's army is much diminished since the Gulf War, and we will probably have plenty of help from Iraqis, once they trust that we intend to finish the job this time. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul.

Instead of not destroying foreign countries, Boot was more interested in pursuing "ambitious goals--such as 'regime change'," which he claimed "are also the most realistic." After all, he suggested, "Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hardly end the 'war on terrorism,' but it beats the alternatives."

Clearly, that went well. Nevertheless, Boot remains an unrepentant advocate of invading Iraq.

In 2006, he wrote in the Los Angeles Times that, when it comes to Iran, "we need to think about a tougher approach to regime change." Five years later, in the same paper, he openly called for "a bombing campaign" against Iran's nuclear facilities.

In 2012, Boot wrote no fewer than six columns in Commentary advocating either the American or Israeli bombing of Iran - three times in January alone.

That same month, Boot insisted that "Time Is Running Out in Syria" for the United States to force regime change and topple the Assad government. Ten weeks later, Boot was less adamant, contemplating that "Time May Be Running Out in Syria." In September 2012, Boot promoted the advice of a retired Israeli general calling for a "Western aerial campaign" against Syria.

Of course, he's also the guy who in 2009 scolded those making comparisons to Vietnam with regard to the ongoing American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, he wrote:

Iraq was difficult, but hardly an irretrievable disaster and certainly not a Vietnam-size disaster. After six and a half years of war, the United States has lost over 4,300 service personnel in Iraq--a sobering and substantial figure but still 13 times fewer fatalities than we suffered in Vietnam. Just as important, all indications in Iraq are that we are winning.

Boot, who prides himself a military historian, is determined to rewrite history so it suits his preferred, undefeated American Empire fantasy. Indeed, he's even claimed that, "in Vietnam between 1968 and 1972 we did more or less win," lamenting, "but we failed to stick it out."

Perhaps most egregiously, Boot makes this claim, totally (deliberately) ignoring the killing fields presided over by U.S. troops for a decade: "We now know that America's defeat was a tragedy for the people of Southeast Asia."

Boot finger wags at the fatalists in the press who don't trust in U.S. imperial dominance. "Rest assured," he wrote in 2009, "a history of being consistently wrong has not deterred all those Boomers who came of age in the 1960s from once again evoking the specter of you-know-what to warn against involvement in Afghanistan."

The Eternal Neocon Target: Iran

He's not money,
and he doesn't even know it.

While Boot advises against "goading" a constantly threatened nuclear-armed state into confrontation, a non-nuclear state is apparently fair game.

Boot's Foreign Policy follow-up to his recent North Korea/Vietnam article is one in which he suggests Donald Trump keep the United States committed to the Iran Deal, while simultaneously "attack[ing] the [Iranian] regime."

Boot beseeches the same president whose "over-the-top bellicosity" so concerns him and who is "far too erratic to be predictable" to - as is the eternal neocon refrain - "take other steps to check the growth of Iranian influence." So, despite knowing that "Trump's impetuosity and ignorance, his saber-rattling could easily spiral out of control, in both Iran and North Korea, leading America into one or more wars that nobody wants," Boot argues for increased anti-Iran aggression anyway to stop Iran's so-called efforts to "Lebanonize" both Iraq and Syria.

The Shia Crescent garbage is recycled here, of course, with Boot collapsing on the fainting couch while claiming, "Iran is now on the verge of controlling a land route running all the way from Tehran to Beirut — the new Persian Empire." Arming more militias and, uh, "moderate rebels" is apparently the answer (I mean, hey, what could go wrong?) and forming more mercenary groups to do Boot's bidding. The rest of Boot's plan is just as asinine - half-baked fantasies about partial Syrian regime change and blowing off the obvious absurdity and murderous colonial consequences of "deepen[ing] American involvement in both Syria and Iraq, carrying risks of increased casualties and effectively committing the United States to a dreaded role in nation-building."

Anything Boot can do to keep American boots on Middle Eastern ground, he'll do.

And, of course, his "history of being consistently wrong" won't be a deterrent.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 11, Part I: The Deficits Racket - The Single-Payer Propaganda War

The idea that the United States is "running out of money" and have to "tighten our belts" is a common trope in American media; the premise that the US government is like a household that must balance its books is largely taken for granted by liberal and right-wing outlets alike.

But is this premise correct? Is it true that the United States is over-budget and ready to explode with insolvency? Where does this conventional wisdom come from and whom does it benefit?

On this and next week's episodes of Citations Needed, we seek to answer some of the questions. In Part I: Single-Payer Propaganda War, we examine the primary talking points against single-payer healthcare and other big government programs and how to combat them with guest Stephanie Kelton.

The Guest

Stephanie Kelton is a professor at Stony Brook University and former Chief Economist for the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. She served as Economic Advisor to the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign and is currently a Fellow at The Sanders Institute and Chair of Board Economists for Peace and Security.

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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!

***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Citations Needed News Brief: Morgan Freeman vs. Putin Almighty

On the latest Patrons-Only Citations Needed News Brief, Adam and I look at the embarrassing launch of a new Red Scare group called the Committee to Investigate Russia (CIR). Their inaugural video features an extremely earnest Morgan Freeman fear-mongering about the Russian "attack" on Amurica and the necessity to now "save democracy."

The CIR Advisory Board boasts at least four hard-right, pro-Iraq War, pro-torture Bush flunkies, alongside other assorted neoconservative ghouls. And also Rob fucking Reiner, for some weird reason. Oh right, because for lifelong Clintonites, any excuse to absolve the 2016 Democratic Presidential Candidate of responsibility for losing the most winnable election of all time will receive full-throated support.

The whole thing is a shameful mess of propaganda.

Really, Morgan Freeman. Really? pic.twitter.com/DazL6Y43Fz

— Nima Shirazi (@WideAsleepNima) September 20, 2017

If you want to check it out, head over the our Patreon page and sign up to support the show. You'll get all the exclusive content!

***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.


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Citations Needed, Episode 10: Ableism and the Ethics of Calling Trump “Crazy”

Rolling Stone ran an article by Matt Taibbi called, "The Madness of Donald Trump," accompanied with this artwork by Victor Juhasz.

"Insane." "Crazy." "Batshit." "Totally fucking nuts."

Trump's mental health and cognitive capacity is the subject of much speculation, joke-making, and earnest concern. But how should the subject be approached by the media?

On this week's episode of Citations Needed, we explore the ethics of diagnosing mental health from afar, the conflation of mental health issues with moral turpitude, the negative effects of the media's nonstop stigmatizing of "insanity," and how to balance all of the above in the face of the undeniable and unique threat to the planet posed by the American president.

The Guests

Dr. Dean Burnett is a doctor of neuroscience, and moonlights as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian. He lectures at Cardiff University and is also the author of The Idiot Brain.

s.e. smith is a writer, agitator, and commentator based in Northern California, with a journalistic focus on social issues, particularly gender, prison reform, disability rights, environmental justice, queerness, class, and the intersections thereof.

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Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!

***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our Production Consultant is Josh Kross. The theme is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Citations Needed, Episode 09: Liberal Media Throws #J20 Activists Under the Bus

The Hashtag Resistance warms up to rightwing ghouls David Frum and Evan McMullin while ignoring anti-Trump protesters facing 80 years in federal prison.

In the wake of Trump’s unexpected win, the “Resistance” to Trump displayed by many in liberal media has been a toxic combination of gratuitous smears of left activists and ignoring their existence altogether. As over 200 people — including several journalists — face decades in prison for being in the proximity of window-breaking the day of Trump’s inauguration, the silence from those nominally charged with opposing Trump is deafening.

If you can donate to the #J20 legal defense fund, do it here.

The Guest

Sam Menefee-Libey is a longtime grassroots organizer and trainer with experience working on a broad spectrum of economic and social justice issues, including anti-oppression, education and environmental justice. Sam is currently a member of the Dead City Legal Posse, working on behalf of #J20 arrestees.

***

Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!

***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Citations Needed, Episode 08: The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex

Samantha Power

The concept of human rights has served as the underlying moral foundation of the United States’s role in the world since the end of World War II.

The conceit that the U.S. has been a dedicated and earnest promoter of “freedom”, “democracy,” and “human rights” throughout the world — even if, at times, a “flawed” one — is a defining narrative, largely taken for granted by major media. But how accurate is this assumption? What do we mean when we talk about “human rights”? What abuses are highlighted and which aren’t? Where do labor rights fit into the broader discussion of human rights?

On this episode of Citations Needed, along with our guest Glenn Greenwald, we attempt to parse some of these complex questions and how they fit into a broader discussions of soft power and war.

The Guest

Glenn Greenwald is a co-founding editor of The Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to co-founding The Intercept, Glenn’s column was featured at The Guardian and Salon. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

***

Citations Needed is available on iTunes, Soundcloud and LibSyn (here’s the RSS feed). You can also check us out on Twitter and Facebook.

***

Want More?

For further reading, show notes, a periodic newsletter, and more exclusive content, please visit our Patreon page and sign up to support the show!

***

Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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Citations Needed, News Brief: Harvey, Climate Change and Snitch Reporters

On this Citations Needed News Brief, we discuss the media's fear of covering Harvey in the context of race, class, and the manifest threat of climate change.

We are joined by Katherine Krueger of Splinter News to talk about journalist narcs and the criminalization of survival.



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Alan Dershowitz Invented a Scary Quote to Fear-Monger About Iran

Alan Dershowitz is a liar.

This is not news, of course. His shoddy scholarship and penchant for plagiarism is well-documented. His relentless and tedious self-promotion, let alone his obsession with celebrity - others', as well as his own - is crude, shameless, and pathetic. His virulent Islamophobia has led him to advocate on behalf of torture and in favor of the Muslim ban. He's defended Trump adviser and white nationalist Steve Bannon and Trump himself on the issue of obstruction of justice. In his unwavering crusade to defend Israeli apartheid and advocate for a military assault on Iran, Dershowitz will sink to whatever depths he can suck breath long enough to reach.

His anti-Iran propaganda not only routinely consists of a catalog of lazy tropes, but, in order to justify his alarmist proselytizing, he also just makes shit up. This goes quite beyond the common political and media practice of deliberately misreading or mistranslating things Iranian leaders say; indeed, Dershowitz's bottomless mendacity includes the manufacturing of supposedly sinister sounding quotes by Iranian politicians.

Earlier this year, in a commentary first published by the hawkish, neoconservative Gatestone Institute - and syndicated in right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Jerusalem Post - he did just that.

In the article, Dershowitz used the hyped-up threat of North Korean nukes to fear-monger about Iran and argue that Congress empower the sociopathic, know-nothing commander-in-chief of the United States to launch a first-strike against Iran if it crosses certain "red lines." He also insists that "Congress should now enact legislation declaring that Iran's reaffirmation that it will never 'develop or acquire nuclear weapons' is an integral part of the agreement and represents the policy of the United States," despite the fact that Iran already regards that commitment as long-standing state policy, fundamental to the 2015 accord, and merely a reiteration of its obligation as an original signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Nevertheless, to make his flimsy case, Dershowitz relies on psychoanalyzing Iranian leaders and determining that - presumably because they're Muslim, are unsupportive of Israeli colonization and occupation in Palestine, and he doesn't like them - they aren't trustworthy and don't regard international agreements they've negotiated, signed, endorsed, and complied with as "legally binding."

Iran is "in the process of upgrading" its missile capability, Dershowitz claims, "and making them capable of delivering a nuclear payload to our shores." This is literally untrue. He also declares that Iran's "fundamentalist religious leaders would be willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy the 'Big Satan' (United States) or the 'Little Satan' (Israel)," adding for good measure that "[t]here is nothing more dangerous than a "suicide regime" armed with nuclear weapons."

This is a neocon canard about Iranian leadership - the 'martyr-state myth' - which holds that the "mad mullahs" of Tehran are both genocidal and suicidal, so eager to bring about Armageddon and so blindingly hostile to the United States and Israel that they will instigate a nuclear apocalypse, guaranteeing the deaths of millions and ensuring the complete annihilation of all Iranians, in order to reach their maniacal goals and reap the heavenly rewards. This concept is totally asinine, born of Orientalist bigotry, yet has held sway over the weak minds of Iran hawks for at least a decade, either as a genuine belief or merely a cynical rhetorical device.

To drive his point home, however, Dershowitz relies on his favorite anecdote about former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died this past January. Here's what he writes:

The late "moderate" leader Hashemi Rafsanjani once told an American journalist that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, they "would kill as many as five million Jews," and that if Israel retaliated, they would kill fifteen million Iranians, which would be "a small sacrifice from among the billion Muslims in the world." He concluded that "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

Dershowitz has referenced this story numerous times before to argue that Iran and its "suicidal leaders" pose an "existential and immediate" threat to Israel. It surfaces in both Preemption, his 2006 book dedicated to justifying war crimes, which The Guardian aptly described as "dangerous, muddled nonsense," and his 2015 book, The Case Against the Iran Deal, an extended and recycled whine against successful diplomacy.

Dershowitz, a cable news fixture, trotted out the same claim during a CNN debate about Iran on February 25, 2015, insisting that Rafsanjani "said if Iran gets nuclear weapons and bombs Israel, it will kill 3 million to 5 million Jews. Israel will retaliate to kill 10 million to 20 million Muslims, and the tradeoff would be worth it because it would destroy Israel and it would leave Islam untouched."

An excerpt for Dershowitz's The Case Against the Iran Deal

He also referenced the same tale in a March 23, 2010, commentary in the Wall Street Journal in which he predictably likens Iran to Nazi Germany and President Barack Obama to Neville "Appeasement" Chamberlain.

Dershowitz's lies flow from the very beginning of the op-ed. "There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do." In fact, Iran has literally never threatened to do anything remotely like this, especially because - again - they've always maintained that their internationally safeguarded, civilian nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-producing purposes only. Even if one doubts Iranian intentions, claiming they've made nuclear threats when they've done precisely the opposite for decades is pathetically dishonest.

Then, to provide a seemingly credible example of the maniacal nature of Iranian officials, it's time for the Rafsanjani anecdote again. This time around, Dershowitz wrote:

Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.

It's a damning story, no doubt, showcasing a callous leader with genocidal thoughts and little regard for human life.

But here's the thing: it's not actually true.

There is no record of a Rafsanjani statement of this kind. Not in 2004, not ever.

However, there is a 2001 Rafsanjani speech that has been routinely misread and manipulated by pro-Israel, Iran hawks to make Iranian policy sound causally genocidal.

On December 14, 2001, former president Rafsanjani delivered the traditional Friday sermon at Tehran University. It was the last Friday of Ramadan and the celebration of Quds (Jerusalem) Day in Iran, an official day of solidarity with Palestinians.

During the speech, Rafsanjani described Israel as an "outgrowth of colonialism and a multi-purpose colonial base," supported by both "the Americans and Britain," along with the United Nations and some "Islamic and Arab governments." Because "the survival of Israel depends on the interests of imperialists and colonialists," he said, "they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favors Israel."

Speaking directly to the longstanding policy of ensuring Israel's overwhelming military superiority in the Middle East - what is known in U.S. foreign policy as Israel's "qualitative military edge" - Rafsanjani explained:

From a numerical point of view, it [Israel] cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they [the United States and Great Britain] have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.

If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.

No comparative calculations of millions dead. No mention of a billion Muslims. No mention of an Iranian nuclear weapon. No mention of Israeli retaliation to an Iranian nuclear attack.

When read in context, Rafsanjani's point is clear. Far from issuing a threat against Israel, he articulates the motivations behind ongoing Western support for Israeli aggression and for guaranteeing Israel's sole possession of a nuclear arsenal in the region. It is a hypothetical posed to explain U.S and British efforts to maintain a gross power imbalance in the Middle East in service of their own interests. Beyond this, at no point does Rafsanjani suggest Iran will produce or obtain non-conventional weapons, let alone threaten to actually use them.

In fact, Rafsanjani is on record stating the very opposite. When he was president, Rafsanjani forcefully and repeatedly denied that the Iranian government had any interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. "We're not after nuclear bombs and we won't go after biological and chemical weapons," he said on March 23, 1997. In 2004, the very year Dershowitz claims Rafsanjani "boasted" about obliterating millions of human lives, Rafsanjani declared, "I absolutely offer the world the assurance that Tehran is not after nuclear arms."

So where did Dershowitz get all that "15 million vs. 5 million" crap? His bad information can be traced directly to a 2004 column by Suzanne Fields in the right-wing The Washington Times. Fields refers obliquely to the Rafsanjani speech cited above, but omits almost all of the actual words, in favor of creative paraphrasing that extrapolates creepy mathematical rhetoric to embellish, exaggerate and exploit the Iranian leader's point.

Here is Fields' version of this tall tale. See if you can spot the similarities to Dershowitz's own subsequent accounts:

In 2001 Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, speculated that in a nuclear exchange with Israel his country might lose 15 million people, which would amount to a small “sacrifice” from among the billion Muslims worldwide in exchange for the lives of 5 million Israeli Jews. He seemed pleased with his formulation.

Dershowitz apparently took Fields' word as gospel and ignored the primary source reporting on Rafsanjani's speech. In his his writing, Dershowitz turned Fields' propagandistic editorializing and complete misreading of Rafsanjani's quote into the quote itself.

Not only does Dershowitz conflate Fields' 2004 column with Rafsanjani's 2001 speech, he somehow imagines that Rafsanjani "boasted" directly to Fields, the "American journalist" he references, instead of addressing an assembled audience at Tehran University. Indeed, the word "sacrifice" never appears in the Rafsanjani speech, let alone in reference to what either Iran or "the Islamic world" would endure in order to annihilate Israel. That appears to be a flourish of Fields' invention, yet another attempt to link the concept of "martyrdom" with state policy, one picked up and repeated with relish by Dershowitz.

Alan Dershowitz is not merely a sloppy or biased researcher, cherry-picking and manipulating information to serve his ideological goals. He is not merely a serial plagiarist; he is a fabricator of evidence in a never-ending case for war against those who, by either their anti-imperial doctrine or mere inconvenient existence, dare challenge American and Israeli policy.

By virtue of his notoriety and self-promotion, however, Dershowitz still enjoys nearly limitless access to cable news platforms, where he continues to spout his nonsense. His editorials and books are still published without even the most cursory oversight of fact-checking by his editors and publishers.

Alan Dershowitz is a full-scale propagandist, for whom facts are irrelevant and lies remain the currency of his celebrity.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 07: BDS & The Moral Narratives of Colonization

In Episode 7 of Citations Needed, we explore how the media discusses the issue of BDS and the broader topic of Palestinian liberation.

What are the stakes? Who are the smear artists? What are the similarities with past apartheid boycotts? We discusses these topics and more using a pro-apartheid 1989 Christian Science Monitor op-ed as our guide.



The Guest

Steven Salaita previously held the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. Author of six previous books, he is a regular columnist for Electronic Intifada and a member of the Organizing Committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).



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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

*****

Citations Needed, News Brief: Charlottesville, The ACLU, and the Moral Limits of 'Free Speech'

In a new Citations Needed News Brief, Adam and I discuss Charlottesville, the ACLU, and the moral limits of 'free speech' with George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University.




*****

UPDATE:

August 17, 2017 - An op-ed by K-Sue Park in The New York Times entitled, "The A.C.L.U. Need to Rethink Free Speech" addresses this issue nicely. Worth the read.

*****

Citations Needed, Episode 06: The Media’s Default Setting of White Supremacy

(Artwork pictured by @/yesitsalex___)

On Episode 6 of Citations Needed, Adam and I explore how the media both consciously and subconsciously works to smear black victims, protect the police, and works overtime to ameliorate the sensibilities of white media consumers.

The white supremacist regime at work in the media can be broken down into three main narrative devices:

1. The use of language to downplay state violence and assert false parity
2. The uncritical dissemination of exaggerated or made up threats to police to turn the aggressor into the victim
3. The posthumous smearing of black victims to rationalize their killing after the fact.

In this episode, we examine the mechanisms of these genres, how they influence public perception and why they create the media environment that makes more Mike Browns all but certain.

The Guest

Dr. Jared A Ball is a professor of Media, Communications, and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Maryland. Dr. Ball is a prolific writer, speaker, and multimedia producer at imixwhatilike.org. His commentary can be read everywhere from the Washington Post to The Nation, the Grio to the Root, and beyond. A forthcoming book from Third World Press entitled, Not Our President: New Directions from the Pushed Out, the Others, and the Clear Majority in Trump’s Stolen America, will featured his essay “Agent Orange: Donald Trump as Political Chemical Warfare.”




Here's the episode:




Show Notes for this episode can be found here.

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Citations Needed is a media criticism podcast, hosted by Adam Johnson and Nima Shirazi, political commentators and media analysts working to call bullshit on (usually corporate) media’s ubiquitous reliance on and regurgitation of false and destructive narratives, tropes and stereotypes.

Citations Needed is produced by Josh Kross and Florence Barrau-Adams. Our theme song is ‘Nonphenomenal Lineage’ by Grandaddy.

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No, LA Times, That's Not What Nuclear 'Breakout Time' Means

Writing in The Los Angeles Times on Sunday about Donald Trump's threat to effectively pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, veteran reporter Doyle McManus noted, "No matter what the president thinks, the facts will get in the way." McManus was referring to the sheer petulance of Trump's pathetically telegraphed plan "to declare Iran in violation of the 2015 agreement to limit its nuclear program" when the next Congressionally-mandated certification date rolls around this coming October.

As such, McManus correctly points out that Donald Trump's approach to the Iran deal demands "Alice-in-Wonderland"-style reality distortion: in spite of its overblown rhetoric, the White House is literally unable to "offer any substantive reason to declare Iran out of compliance with the deal — because there isn’t one."

The periodic recertification is not required by the deal - known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) - itself; rather, it is an empty ritual designed by anti-Iran lawmakers frustrated by the Obama administration's successful multilateral diplomacy. The actual nuclear agreement - agreed to by Iran, Great Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the United States, and the European Union, and concretized by the UN Security Council - is not beholden to specific U.S. legislation or presidential reauthorization every three months. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the sole authority empowered to verify Iran's continued compliance with its obligations, namely maintaining a limited stockpile of low-enriched uranium suitable only for research and fueling power plants and ensuring that no fissile material is diverted for military purposes. Since the signing of the JCPOA, according to the IAEA, Iran has consistency fulfilled its obligations.

While McManus is undoubtedly correct that facts don't matter to the reality TV host who sometimes sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office - because he's both unaware of what they are and wouldn't care about them if he did - the LA Times reporter's own grasp of reality regarding Iran's nuclear program unfortunately has limits of its own.

The second paragraph of McManus's column notes, "before the agreement, Tehran was believed to be less than a year from making nuclear weapons that would have threatened Israel and Saudi Arabia."

There are a lot of assumptions in that sentence, all of them false.

To start, McManus gives the deliberate impression that, prior to the signing of the JCPOA in July 2015, Iran was actively attempting to build nuclear bombs with which to threaten its regional adversaries, both of whom are close U.S. partners. This is untrue.

Iran does have a nuclear energy program, monitored and safeguarded by the IAEA. The IAEA has affirmed time and again that Iran has never taken steps to divert nuclear material to military purposes. Furthermore, since the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community and its allies, including Israel, has officially maintained that whatever research relevant to nuclear weaponization Iran may have conducted in the past stopped by 2003 and has never started. The NIE has been consistently reaffirmed ever since (in 2009, 2010, and again in 2011).

Even allegations that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program before 2003 are dubious, and rely on Israeli-linked evidence that is most likely completely fabricated. The authenticity of these accusations has been repeatedly questioned by the IAEA, as well as by the United States itself. U.S. intelligence officials, noted former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception, "did not share the supposed [new Israeli] evidence that had led them to confirm the existence of a past Iranian nuclear [weapons] program, other than to refer to the same unverified set of allegations about weaponization studies that had already been discussed with the Agency." And when Israel provided the IAEA with more allegedly incriminating documentation in 2009, no one was fooled. As ElBaradei explains, "The Agency's technical experts, however, raised numerous questions about the documents' authenticity," adding in a footnote, "The accuracy of these accusations has never been verified; however, it is significant that the conclusion of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate were not changed, indicating that they, at least, did not buy the "evidence" put forward by Israel." 

Quite simply, the much-heralded "Iranian nuclear weapons program" simply doesn't exist, and never has.

Thus, the scenario presented by McManus - that, before the deal, Iran was "less than a year from making nuclear weapons" - is false. You can't be year away from finishing something you're not starting in the first place.

The "year away" calculation for what's known as "breakout time," however, is a commonplace canard in reporting on Iran's nuclear program. It relies on the presumption that the Iranian leadership has made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program (there's zero evidence for this) and will at one point kick IAEA inspectors out of the country and embark on full-scale weaponization of enriched uranium to then mount on a ballistic missile headed for Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Langley, Virginia. The "breakout" scenario seeks to put in time-bound terms the potential threat that a nuclear-armed Iran could theoretically pose. Yet it's all hypothetical.

McManus, like so many others, has misunderstood the U.S. government's own assessment of Iran's capabilities. For years now, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has confirmed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons and that its leadership hasn't given the order to start doing so. Since 2010, the phrase "We do not know whether Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons" has been repeated in each and every annual "Worldwide Threat Assessment" report delivered by the DNI to Congress. Following the implementation of the JCPOA, the assessment has noted, "Iran's implementation of the JCPOA, however, has extended the amount of time Iran would need to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon from a few months to about a year."

All too often, reporters like McManus conflate "the amount of time Iran would need to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon" with the amount of time it would take to field a deliverable nuclear bomb. These are not the same thing.

Former National Security Council advisor Gary Sick explained this exact problem with "breakout" alarmism as nuclear negotiations hit their final stretch in 2015:

Put simply, for purposes of this agreement, "breakout" exists when Iran masses enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for one nuclear device. Note that "breakout" does not mean Iran will have a nuclear device. It is the starting point to build a nuclear device, which most experts agree would require roughly a year for Iran to do–and probably another two or more years to create a device that could be fit into a workable missile warhead. Plus every other country that has ever built a nuclear weapon considered it essential to run a test before actually using their design. There goes bomb No. 1.

So when officials, pundits, and interested parties talk about a one-year breakout time for Iran, what they are really saying is that if Iran decides to break its word and go for a bomb, it will take approximately one year to accumulate 27 kilograms of HEU. The hard part follows.

"In short," as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has noted, "breakout is a scary fantasy, but no more than that. It is a badly flawed standard for formulating a negotiating position or for evaluating a deal with Iran."

Also missing from McManus' article is any context for Iran's own civilian nuclear program. It is not, as the press would so often have us believe, a nefarious outlier on the world stage. Far from it, in fact.

For over a decade now, it has been acknowledged that, in addition to the nine nuclear weapons states (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), perhaps "40 countries or more now have the know-how to produce nuclear weapons," according to ElBaradei, though not all of those nations have domestic enrichment capabilities like Iran.

This is simply a matter of science. Nuclear technology and knowhow can inherently be used both for peaceful and military purposes. "[I]f a nation has a developed civilian nuclear infrastructure—which the NPT actually encourages—this implies it has a fairly solid nuclear-weapons capability," nuclear physicist Yousaf Butt has pointed out. "Just like Iran, Argentina, Brazil, and Japan also have a nuclear-weapons capability—they, too, could break out of the NPT and make a nuclear device in short order. Capabilities and intentions cannot be conflated."

This is not news. It's the fundamental reality of dual-use technology like nuclear energy. "Virtually any industrialized nation today has the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons within several years if the decision to do so were made," noted a 1996 report by a former weapons system analyst. "Nations already possessing substantial nuclear technology and arms industries could do so in no more than a year or two."

In 2013, the University of Maryland conducted a study of media coverage on Iran's nuclear program. It found that mainstream reporting is "plagued with error, often decontextualized, and hews strongly to official American and Israeli government narratives." Moreover, the study revealed that, on the rare occasion that the media addresses "Iranian nuclear intentions and capabilities, it did so in a manner that lacked precision, was inconsistent over time, and failed to provide adequate sourcing and context for claims."

When it comes to Iran and its nuclear program, basic facts are misunderstood, then repeated ad nauseam. It is no wonder why the phony threat of a non-existent nuclear weapons-armed Iran has proliferated so thoroughly throughout the media and onto the public.

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