If the house where Julian Assange of Wikileaks is staying is destroyed by a Predator drone, and the United States denies any involvement … Well, I'll believe them.
One of the most common threads running through the Wikileaks papers is Washington's manic obsession with Iran. In country after country the United States exerts unceasing pressure on the government to tighten the noose around Iran's neck, to make the American sanctions as extensive and as painful as can be, to inflate the alleged Iranian nuclear threat, to discourage normal contact as if Iran were a leper.
"Fear of 'different world' if Iran gets nuclear weapons. Embassy cables reveal how US relentlessly cajoles and bullies governments not to give succour to Tehran," read a Guardian of London headline on November 28. And we're told that Arab governments support the United States in this endeavor, that fear of Iran is widespread. John Kerry, the Democratic head of the Senate foreign relations committee, jumped on this bandwagon. "Things that I have heard from the mouths of King Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] and Hosni Mubarak [Egyptian president] and others are now quite public," he said. He went on to say there was a "consensus on Iran". (Guardian, December 2) If all this is to have real meaning, the implication must be that the Arab people feel this way, and not just their dictator leaders. So let us look at some numbers.
The annual "Arab Public Opinion Poll", was conducted this past summer by Zogby International and the University of Maryland, in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. A sample of the results:
· "If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, which of the following is the likely outcome for the Middle East region?" More positive 57%, Would not matter 20, More negative 21.
· Amongst those who believe that Iran seeks nuclear weapons, 70% believe that Iran has the right to its nuclear program.
· "In a world where there is only one superpower, which of the following countries would you prefer to be that superpower?"
France 35%, China 16, Germany 13, Britain 9, Russia 8, United States 7, Pakistan 6.
· "Name TWO countries that you think pose the biggest threat to you." Israel 88%, US 77, Algeria 10, Iran 10, UK 8, China 3, Syria 1.
William Blum left the U.S. State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital.
Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government\'s "socialist experiment," and then its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world.
In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.
His book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated since, has received international acclaim. Noam Chomsky called it "Far and away the best book on the topic."
In 1999, Blum was one of the recipients of Project Censored\'s awards for "exemplary journalism" for writing one of the top ten censored stories of 1998, an article on how, in the 1980s, the United States gave Iraq the material to develop a chemical and biological warfare capability.
Blum\'s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World\'s Only Superpower, was published in 2000, and updated in 2005. It was written in reaction to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which, we were told, was done for humanitarian purposes. The book is in effect a mini-encyclopedia of all the un-humanitarian actions of the US government during the past half century. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
In 2002, Blum\'s West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir appeared. During 2002-2003, Blum was a regular columnist for the magazine The Ecologist, which is published in London and distributed globally.
In 2004, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire was published. Blum\'s numerous essays can be found online at Znet, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and many other sites.
Blum writes a monthly newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report, which is sent free to anyone requesting it by email.
