Op-ed by Tommy Johnson
On October 8th 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Iranian security officials helped plan” the counter offensive against the Israeli occupation of Palestine which took place the day before. More recently, the New York Times reports “Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III stopped short on Thursday of blaming Iran for attacks that killed three U.S. service members on Sunday in Jordan but said that Tehran trained and funded the militia groups that have targeted American troops and commercial shipping in the Middle East.” Reuters reported that Austin vowed the U.S. would take “‘all necessary actions’ to defend its troops after a deadly drone attack in Jordan by Iran-backed militants…” If we believed the imperialists and the newspapers kept snugly in their pockets, one would have it that the Iranian state leads, trains, and sponsors every action taken against the US and is lackeys. The US imperialists are so busy prefacing every mention of resistance groups with the mantra “Iranian-backed” that they seldom even bother naming the “rebel groups” in question.
A basic principle of journalism is to report the most important thing first, and we can gather what is most important to the imperialist ruling class by their manner demonstrated above. They do not think it important to name the “rebel-groups” and “militants.” Instead they cast them all as Iranian proxies with no interests or peculiarities of their own. This is how readers are conditioned for war over time, so that when it comes it is no surprise. There can be no vigorous opposition to imperialist war from a population indoctrinated by western bourgeois media.
Iran is a small oppressed country in the Middle East. The US is a large oppressor country in the west. These are facts. Iran’s relationship to its neighbors should surprise no one. The violence itself is the consequence of imperialist intrusion into the region, and Iran is not the problem here. Workers in the US need to see this and not be taken in by this manufacturing of war sentiment from the ruling class.
To get a truly accurate picture, the working class reader can simply place “US -backed” or “US-trained” or “US-funded” in front of mentions of all Israeli acts of war crimes and genocide, all acts of oppression carried out by the Jordanian Army, the Saudi Arabian state, and so on. No one in the world is offering more money and training to butchers in the Middle East than the USA.
The facts unfold like this: The US had over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, where they tried war for 20 years to prop up an illegitimate “US-backed” regime; 160,000 personnel in Iraq tormented people and trained more butchers, while 30,000 remain in the region today. Add to this the thousands more troops and warships they have sent since October of last year. The US also maintains its largest military base in Qatar and smaller bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), 900 troops in Syria placed around oil fields, several military bases in Turkey containing thousands of US troops and personnel operated “jointly” with the fascist Turkish state, at least one classified base in Israel, though likely more. Further, The US sends over $3.3 billion to Israel per year, and add to this the $14.5 billion increase passed in November of last year. $100 million went to Turkey for “disaster aid” used to brutalize its own people on top of the regular $8.5 million in military aid. This list could extend for quite some time and the reader is sufficiently nauseated by it. Without a doubt, it is enough to highlight who the real sponsor of the terror inflicted upon the masses of the Middle East really is.
image: Graphic displaying known numbers of US troops in the Middle East in 2023, Axios/Kavya Beheraj
