On 5/15/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/05/15/ian-buruma-on-hugo-chavez/
I wonder if Ali Hili's story (quoted by Gary Leupp you quote) and others like it are getting play _now_ because now the main task of Washington is not to demonize Saddam Hussein (who is after all safely in Washington's hands) but to manufacture consent for sanctions or missile strikes on Iran: <blockquote>ALI HILI: No, no, no, no. Actually, I'm personally, I have big hate for this person. He is the worst thing that ever happened to Iraq, maybe, until we saw these religious mullahs who were brought to the government to lead this country. We were much better off in the Saddam time, although he's a tyrant. But the Middle East is not that little, simple a-b-c. The politics shouldn't approach Iraq in that way. Again, it's a huge, huge mistake, taking off a secular state, with a neighbor Islamic state. Iran has a great, huge, huge influence now on Iraqi government. And they want to adapt the Islamic -- Iran version inside Iraq and in the south. We have sources that's been telling us that several, several Iranian officers and people are really working with the government, and especially the last report we got today from Mr. Muhammed al-Shahwani, the Iraqi intelligence director of the Ha'aretz newspaper, it says names and addresses belonging to Badr organization, closely associated to the Iranian regime, were discovered during a raid by the Iraqi Intelligence Agency against police central last month, and Iranians were arrested during the raid. In Iraq. One was charged of a television station; with no authorization, he's working. And another one is an officer intelligence from Iranian regime. These horrific -- and in fact, it's proved that Iraq has been penetrated by the Iranian regime, through these mullahs and religious parties. <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/153203></blockquote> [Note that Hili is getting interviewed along with Doug Ireland.] What Hili says he believes may or may not be true -- who knows? But the point of his story is to have us regard Tehran as the main problem for Iraqis. See, Washington once tried to have the world believe that it is invading Iraq to save Iraqis from Saddam Hussein; now it's gearing up to have the world believe that we must "do something" about Iran . . . to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons, to save Iraqis from Tehran, to save Iraqi gays (!) from Iranian clerics. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
