A newly released security report concluded that when Canada closed its Iranian embassy, back in 2012, there was no dire threat to embassy staff. The biggest threat was a possible earthquake. Although to be fair, that report didn’t include imaginary threats, like Islamic ghost witches or WMDs: witches of mass destruction.
You might remember that Iran was included in the “axis of evil” in 2001. The axis of evil. Not an Avengers sequel, an actual phrase presented to adults to help them better understand the world.
But when reporting on Iran, most of the media ignores certain history. In 1951 the Iranian people made the mistake of voting for someone who wanted to nationalize their oil industry, and in response the U.S. installed a torturing dictator, the Shah. The New York Times said this about it at the time: “underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.”
But Iranians forgot that object lesson and overthrew the Shah in 1979. So the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein in his attack on Iran which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Given how threatened Canada recently felt by a couple of lone killers, you can imagine how we might react to these slightly bigger acts of aggression. Our newspapers would use exclusively all caps. The National would change its title to a series of exclamation marks.
Canada supposedly closed our embassy because Iran was a clear and present danger, but the clear and present danger is to Iran, not from it. It’s been continuously threatened with attack by the U.S. and Israel, which both have nuclear weapons. Blaming the situation on Iran is basically the geopolitical version of “What are you hitting yourself for?”
Iran might be a threat to its own people, probably not as much as our allies like Saudi Arabia. But the only threat it poses to the west is the threat of not being under its control, a.k.a. EVIIIIIIIIL
This video is reposted from The Toronto Star.
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