Wired’s Weird Propaganda and the Most Dangerous Man in the World By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | December 22, 2012Iranian Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, Wired writer Robert BeckhusenThe wizards of Wired‘s Danger Room blog have posted a year-end click-bait listicle identifying who they – Spencer Ackerman, David Axe, Nathan Shachtman, and Robert Beckhusen – believe to be “The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World.”
While Paul Broadwell starts the list for some strange reason, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan clocks in at number four (with entry author Ackerman studiously avoiding any mention of Brennan’s rampant lies over the murderous drone program he oversees, or the staggering civilian death toll for which Brennan and his boss are personally responsible) and Bashar al-Assad at number two, the Danger Roomers peg Iranian Brigadier General Ghasem Soleimani (they write it as Qassem Suleimani) – head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Qods Force – as the single most dangerous man on Earth.
Beckhuser, who wrote the final entry for Wired, begins with a truly bizarre formulation. ”As the country most likely to spark a world war,” he writes, “Iran has to be considered the most dangerous country on the planet.”
Let’s read that again and then unpack it. Iran – in Beckhuser’s estimation (one that he seems to think is a pretty uncontroversial assumption) – is “the country most likely to spark a world war.” (emphasis added) In fact, United States intelligence has long held that Iran maintains defensive capabilities and has a military doctrine of self-defense and retaliation, but will not begin a conflict.
In April 2010, Defense Intelligence Agency director Lieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess told the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, “Iran’s military strategy is designed to defend against external threats, particularly from the United States and Israel. Its principles of military strategy include deterrence, asymmetrical retaliation, and attrition warfare.”
Burgess’ intelligence report, delivered in conjunction with his testimony, also included the assessment that Iran maintains a “defensive military doctrine, which is designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities,” and that “Iranian military training and public statements echo this defensive doctrine of delay and attrition.” The identical position was reaffirmed by Burgess’ testimony in March 2011, during which he explained that, if attacked, “Iran could attempt to block the Strait of Hormuz temporarily with its navy, threaten the United States and its allies in the region with missiles, and employ terrorist [sic] surrogates worldwide. However, we assess Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict or launch a preemptive attack.”
This year, Burgess repeated these conclusions (which have been the consensus view of U.S. intelligence for years), reiterating that the Defense Intelligence Agency “assesses Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.”
So what does Beckhuser mean when he claims that Iran is ”the country most likely to spark a world war”? While an unprovoked attack on Iran is widely seen as a terrible, “stupid” idea (and a war crime of obvious and unequivocal illegality) by those not of the neoconservative persuasion, and one that could potentially lead to a global conflagration, the idea that Iran would start such a war is not actually a consideration. Even former Israeli Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy warned, “An attack on Iran could affect not only Israel, but the entire region for 100 years.” Note how the potential attack suggested by Levy is on Iran by an unmentioned aggressor, and not by Iran on any other country.
Maybe that’s why Beckhuser wrote “spark” rather than “start.”
In so doing, however, the Wired writer is effectively – in this warped thought experiment – blaming Iran for getting itself attacked by Israel or the United States. He appears to be saying that if Iran responds to a foreign military assault, it would somehow be culpable for “sparking” a global conflict, the instigator of a new world war. The twisted logic of such an assertion reveals a very specific perception of Iran as a perennial provocateur of violence visited upon itself...
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