Re: [Salon] Letter to Thomas Friedman. Re: "It's Time for America to Get Real with Iran and Israel, " October 15, 2024, opinion - Guest Post by Bruce Fein and Ralph Nader

Letter to Thomas Friedman. Re: "It's Time for America to Get Real with Iran and Israel," October 15, 2024, opinion Hi Tom, The United States is the greatest imperial power in the world history by orders of magnitude. Among other things, we sport more than 800 military bases in foreign countries; special forces deployed in virtually every country on the planet; $1.5 trillion expended annually on national security; a $1.7 trillion upgrade of our nuclear arsenal over the next three decades; chronic invasions of the sovereignty of multiple nations, for example, criminal wars of aggression against Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, using drones, boots on the ground, bombings, or otherwise and intoning, “international terrorism;” and becoming a co-combatant with Israel in a criminal war of aggression against Iran. We are in no position to lecture other nations about renouncing imperialism. This is what Iranian’s intelligence chief would say to C.I.A. Director Bill Burns in Muscat, Oman. The United States is responsible for making Iran an enemy. You overthrew the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, who had made Iran the only genuine democracy in the history of the Middle East. You installed the corrupt, dictatorial Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. You created SAVAK, equivalent to the Gestapo, to crush every whisper of political dissent. You created the conditions of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and entrenched radical Islam. You supported arch-enemy Iraq in its 1980-88 war against Iran, featuring Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and Iraq’s multiple deadly missile attacks on Iranian cities. You have shut your eyes to Israel’s collection of scores if not hundreds of nuclear warheads and Israel’s implacable opposition to signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You have ignored Israel’s assassinations of Iran’s top nuclear scientists. You have aided and abetted Israel’s industrial scale war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. You made clear in your 2011 overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi after his abandonment of WMD that you would orchestrate a second edition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran if it abandoned its nuclear ambitions. You even shot down a civilian Iranian airplane over the Persian Gulf in 1988 killing 290. Regime change is your soundtrack towards Iran. Do not lecture Iran on a rule-based international order. Your foreign policy is indistinguishable from the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. What you need to do is start following your own gospel. Follow the example of President Eisenhower in 1956 in arresting the unprovoked attack on Egypt by Israel, France, and the United Kingdom. Get out of the region. Tend to your own garden. So here is what we propose. An end to imperialism in all its ugly moods and tenses. Iran ends its presence or influence in neighboring countries and Gaza, and the United States shuts down its imperial presence around the globe, including all military bases abroad, special forces, 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and the Monroe Doctrine claiming a United States sphere of influence throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean. You act as if you were God’s chosen people endowed with wise and angelic DNA withheld from all other nations. Stop fantasizing. You are the only nation in the world that has used atomic bombs against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We would be crazy not to believe you hope the same for Tehran and Tabriz. You have entered the domain of George Orwell and Animal Farm: All nations are equal, but some are more equal than others. Iran is eager to conclude with you a Joint Termination of Imperialism treaty. Check with President Biden and the U.S. Senate for a green light and we can start the drafting. Tom, how would you answer the Iranian intelligence chief? That would be a wonderful column. Sincerely, Bruce Fein Ralph Nader