Gareth Porter said on Flashpoints, that the person who was killed, was not a
nuclear scientist, but is part of Iran's defense department.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Assassins & Iran
December 1, 2020
Any thought of Biden and his people riding into town on white horses to save
the nuclear deal is strictly naïve.
The remains of Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Fakhrizadeh at the Fatima Masumeh
Shrine, Nov. 29, 2020. (Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I was on the telephone with a friend in Tehran Sunday and found myself
telling him about a Christmas card I kept tacked to the pantry door of a
farmhouse I lived in many years ago. Merry Christmas, and Im sorry
, it
read on the front. And inside: Im sorry my country bombed your country.
Soroosh, and we will stay with first names, laughed as I knew he would. The
joke extends to assassinations now, he said in a tone that was good-humored
and rueful all at once. The joke is bitter and has long extended to
assassinations, as anyone with a sound book of postwar history knows.
Did I as an American owe Soroosh and 82 million other Iranians an apology?
Did the United States assassinate Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Irans most
accomplished nuclear scientist, last Friday?
My answers, in order: Yes, and it was my privilege to have an occasion to
offer one. And yes: Apartheid Israel did the wet work, as they say, but this
is no time for mincing words. The United States is responsible for the
assassination of a senior figure in the Islamic Republics scientific
community. I make this assertion with full confidence in its truth.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, at far left, speaking with a military official in
undated photo. (Tasnim News Agency, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Our mainstream press has treated us to days of earnest rumination as to
Israels direct role in Fakhrizadehs murder. There is now a general
consensus on this point, including within our kindly intelligence
community. But the generous servings of postulation it had all the
hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, The New York Times told
us Sunday is little more than idle distraction that (1) eases us into the
reality of Israels wanton savagery and (2) serves to suggest the U.S. had
nothing to do with it.
The star performer in this line is none other than John Brennan, the former
CIA director, chief architect of the Russiagate psy op, and I say this
with certaintyamong the boldest liars of my lifetime. This was a criminal
act & highly reckless, Brennan tweeted over the weekend. It risks lethal
retaliation & a new round of regional conflict. Iranian leaders would be
wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global
stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits.
What is the old spook saying here? Good enough that Brennan fingers the
Israelis without naming them. But all will be well with the return of
responsible American leadership? It looks to me as if Brennan is implicitly
accusing the Trump regime of complicity while preserving the myth of
American innocence for the incoming Biden regime.
The Larger Context
Let us be crystal clear. This is not about who pulled the trigger on a
boulevard outside Tehran last Friday. Did the U.S. command Patrice Lumumbas
firing squad in the Katangan jungle in 1961? Did it drive Salvador Allende
to suicide (if it was a suicide) in Santiago in 1973? No and no. Did it bear
responsibility for these deaths? Yes and yes.
Closer to our time, did Susan Rice, acting as Barack Obamas national
security adviser, condemn the popularly elected Mohammad Morsi to death
seven years ago? No. Did she, in an unambiguously damning telephone call,
authorize the 2013 coup in Egypt that led to it? Yes again.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, with Israels Prime Minster
Benjamin Netanyahu, in Jerusalem, Nov. 19, 2020. (State Department, Ron
Przysucha)
In all such cases and certainly in this latest, it is merely a matter of
seeing events in their larger context which we must do for ourselves, as
our government and our press are wholly dedicated to preventing any such
thing to the fullest extent they can. And in this larger context, it is
hardly difficult to recognize Washingtons culpability in yet another
murder.
By the available evidence, Israel has been murdering Iranian scientists
routinely for a decade or more. In a properly outraged column published over
the weekend in Haaretz, Gideon Levy counts roughly a dozen. This reflects
what we can usefully think of as Israels cult of assassination. Alongside
drip irrigation and cherry tomatoes, Levy writes piercingly, there are few
areas in which Israel takes more pride than what it calls targeted
killings, which are in fact acts of murder by the state.
Culture of Violence
This culture of violence against others Levy counts 70 assassinations of
Palestinians since 2000 is a long, dreadful story. For my money, the most
diabolic mind could not conjure a more perverse memorial to the 6 million.
Did this culture take root without American dispensation? Given the
(appalling) nature of the U.S.Israeli relationship, it is simply impossible
to conceive of this.
Since the 1967 war, Washington has been on one long, Susan Ricestyle
telephone call implicitly or explicitly authorizing apartheid Israels
lawlessness. The Israelis are our Chilean military officers in the Mideast.
Bibi Netanyahu is the structural equivalent of Mobutu Sese Seko, a corrupt
punk with a temporary surfeit of power.
Much is rightfully made of Israels undue influence in American politics, on
Capitol Hill and elsewhere. But in deals-a-deal fashion, Israel is a
faithful and very key outpost of the empire, and this is not to be
forgotten. It gets the same pass as any blood-soaked dictatorship for its
excesses. Hence the missile systems, the gunships, the F16s and F35s, and
all the rest.
Yes, Israel sometimes oversteps its bounds from the U.S. perspective,
notably during the long years of Netanyahus premiership. But as all
paying-attention people have long understood, whatever Israel does will
eventually be put down as a minor infraction in the larger scheme of things
and accepted among the policy cliques in Washington. Joe You dont have to
be a Jew to be a Zionist Biden is no stranger to this stuff.
Outline of the Case
Aftermath of the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Absard, a city near
Tehran on Nov. 27. (Fars News Agency)
The outline of the Fakhrizadeh case is available to us and is not so
difficult to read. Of what we know of things, this looks like a case of the
Trump regimes explicit approval, if not encouragement. But Brennans
thought that Biden and his people will ride into town on white horses is
strictly for the naïve.
Mike Pompeo, who has sought to provoke open conflict with Iran every hour of
his day he is not doing the same with China, paid a final visit to Netanyahu
on Nov. 19, eight days before Fakhrizadeh was murdered. The Israeli PM
afterward described the encounter with our rotund secretary of state as
intimate and productive.
That was a Thursday. Al Jazeera subsequently reported that Netanyahu
secretly flew to Saudi Arabia the following Sunday for a meeting with Saudi
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pompeo. A member of Netanyahus
cabinet and Likud party on Monday confirmed reports that the Israeli leader
had held a meeting in Saudi Arabia, calling it an amazing achievement, Al
Jazz reported.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in front of U.S. flag; meeting with Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in Neom, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 22, 2020. (State
Department, Ron Przysucha)
That puts three brimming-with-anomie enemies of Iran in the same room, two
of them for the second time in four days. It is possible the assassination
plot, a plot of obvious geopolitical consequence, never came up. We do not
know this, just as we do not know if that part of the moon not made of rocks
is indeed made of cheese. What we know is that Fakhrizadeh was dead five
days after the Saudi gathering.
My reading: Pompeo is getting in his final innings before he cleans out his
locker in Foggy Bottom. Having failed to start his biblical war with Iran,
the best he could do was leave a mess behind for the responsible American
leadership about to assume power in Washington. Neither Bibi nor MbS, who
are now toying with the idea of normalizing relations, requires any
persuasion in the matter of making messes with Iran.
We now read that the Fakhrizadeh murder may have fatally sabotaged
President-elect Bidens plans to restore the U.S. to the 2015 accord
governing Irans nuclear programs, which President Donald Trump abandoned a
year into his term. How does that work? If Biden and his new advisers
Antony Blinken at State, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser are
serious about diplomacy with Tehran, now is the time to go full-tilt for it,
wouldnt you say? Gentlemen, mount those white horses.
In the same piece presenting the weird argument about the damage just
inflicted on Bidens diplomatic aspirations, Sullivan is quoted as saying
the U.S. will return to the accord if Iran returns to compliance, for its
obligations that it has been violating, and is prepared to advance
good-faith negotiations on these follow-on agreements.
The follow-on agreements seem to be those Trump and Pompeo have insisted
upon no missile-defense systems, no efforts to secure its neighborhood,
the latter mischaracterized as acts of terror. Let me get this straight:
Were here to correct the Trump regimes mistakes, and we propose to do so
by embracing them?
These people are simply not serious.
My tentative conclusion: Biden, Blinken and Sullivan cannot see their way to
recommitting to the 2015 agreement because Biden is inexcusably close to
Israel and Israel has stated its opposition to this in the clearest of
terms. For the time being, it looks as if they will take cover in the
Fakhrizadeh murder as they slither out the side door on Iran: Golly, we
wanted to talk to Tehran but events have foiled us.
Shall we mark this down as Foreign Policy Failure No. 1 for our responsible
American leadership? We will have to keep track as the numbers rise.
