Partners in Crime
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
04/02/07 "ICH"
-- - Indeed, there is honor among thieves. Given that the US
under President Eisenhower delivered a coup against the
democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadeq to appease the
British, the British have since been eager to fulfill their
obligations towards the Americans. Every theft has been mutually
beneficial, although the prize has never been equally divided.
The motives behind the decisions have never been openly
discussed and democratically concluded; thievery and murder
requires discretion, especially in democracies, it would seem.
No doubt most of us have fresh memories of the famous ‘dossier’,
the 284 page intelligence report by the Blair government that
nailed the coffin of almost one million Iraqis and over 3000
American servicemen and women; the foreword delivered by Tony
Blair warning us that Saddam Hossein had the ability and the
intention to launch WMD in 45 minutes lent support to our
government’s campaign of misinformation in order to invade
sovereign Iraq. The pool of blood from the ongoing death toll
must drowned the shameful discovery that Blair had plagiarized
several scholarly papers to make up the false allegations in
order for the partners to take us to war .
It is not the first time that the two conspirators worked
together to cause ruin and steal a nation.
The Island of Diego Garcia discovered in the 1500s by the
Portugese was a territory of Mauritius between 1814 and 1965, at
which point it became part of part of the Chagos Archipelago,
part of the newly created British Indian Ocean Territory. In
1970, the British leased the Island to the Americans. The
Americans had asked the British for one of their colonies for a
military base. Britain obliged. In 1967 through 1973, the native
inhabitants, known as the Ilois, or the Chagossians, were forced
to leave the island. . Uprooted and robbed of their livelihood,
the Chagossians now live in poverty in Mauritius’s urban slums,
more than 1,000 miles from their homeland. A smaller number were
deported to the Seychelles. All but the seagulls were left on
the island. It is of note that Mr. Cheney’s company,
Halliburton, built the base. Later, the campaign of ‘shock and
awe’ against Iraq was carried out from the stolen nation of
Diego Garcia.
It is equally noteworthy that during the run-up to the Iraq
invasion, while Fox News and other such media ‘established’ that
Saddam Hossein was developing chemical weapons by showing videos
of dogs being injected with chemicals for the purpose of
experimentation and development of chemical weapons, molding the
public opinion for the invasion of Iraq, our own crimes have
always been kept hidden from the public. After the natives of
Diego Garcia Island were expelled from their homes, "officials
ordered their pets to be exterminated. They were gassed with
exhaust fumes from American military vehicles”
Today, the British are once again facilitating invasion, war,
and mass murder.
Britain has sent fifteen marines into Iranian waters to provoke
a reaction from Iran. While it is rumored in many quarters that
this is setting up a ‘Gulf of Tonkin-style pretext for war’,
undoubtedly the British cannot claim that the sailors were in
Iraqi waters as the Shatt-el-Arab waterway is not clearly
identifiable and one has to question how the British have come
up with a maritime boundary.
While internally Iran has its problems, the threat to the
outside world is its lack of good public relations. It does not
have the knowledge, the power, the will, or the economic
strength of the United States to hire Charlotte Beers who was
appointed Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and
Public Affairs in October 2001. Beers’ job was to rebrand Osama
bin Laden as a mass murderer to millions of Muslims and win over
sympathy. Likewise, they do not have Turkey’s ‘in’ who in 1985
engaged Gray & Company at $600,000 a year; a prominent
Washington public relations company with close ties to the
Reagan administration to give Turkey an image make-over. Iran’s
poor PR is exacerbated by its own actions, compounded by the
mainstream media. While the display of the captured sailors is
not serving Iran’s national interest, especially by putting a
headscarf on the female sailor – something not tolerated by the
majority of women in Iran, it should by no means be a
distraction of who the real guilty party is. Threat of inciting
war in order to commit mass murder is far graver than that of
foolhardiness.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has lived and studied in Iran, the UK,
France, and the US. She obtained her Bachelors Degree in
International Relations from the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. She is currently pursuing her education
in Middle East studies and Public Diplomacy. Soraya has done
extensive research on US foreign policy towards Iran and Iran’s
nuclear program. She can be reached at sorayau@earthlink.net
Notes
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page284.asp
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/2003/0205plagiarism.htm
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/jackowski08012004
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