Kourosh Ziabari

Economic sanctions, psychological warfare, media propaganda, threats and assassinations; what other sort of evidence one may need to believe that the United States, Israel and their European allies have already started their much liked war against Iran and that this unjustifiable war is taking its toll on the innocent, ordinary Iranian citizens?

They say that they have a problem with Iran's nuclear program; that Iran's nuclear activities aren't transparent; that they fear Iran may one day develop nuclear weapons; that Iran may some day drop atomic bombs on Israel and that Iran poses a threat to global peace and security.

But this is not really the case. Perhaps the American journalist and radio host, Mark Glenn, has described the truth in the most comprehensible and sound way: "if Iran had no nuclear program, these countries would make the claim that Iran is financing international terrorism through the export and sale of Pistachio nuts. What is at issue here is that Iran refuses to be a slave to the 2-headed beast of Israeli, western financial and political interests."

Washington's animosity toward Tehran is nothing new or unprecedented, nor is it related to Iran's nuclear program. Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 dethroned the U.S.-backed monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the U.S. politicians began to carry a chip on their shoulder and started disposing of Iran with hostility and enmity.

With the victory of Iran's popular revolution led by the charismatic leader Imam Khomeini who strongly opposed the American imperialism and militarism, the sanctions against Iran began to take effect. Under President Carter, the U.S. imposed a set of sanctions on Iran's oil sector and then blocked USD 12 billion of Iranian government's assets in Washington. After the deadly 1983 Beirut barracks bombing in which 241 American marines were killed, the U.S. government renewed its sanctions, this time with the order of Ronald Reagan. Reagan administration declared Iran a sponsor of international terrorism and called on the World Bank to stop giving loans to Iran. The deadly attack on the U.S. peacekeeping forces in Beirut for which the White House blamed Iran turned out to be an Israeli false flag operation, as revealed by the former Mossad executive Victor Ostrovsky in a famous 1990 book titled " By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer."

The Clinton administration toughened the sanctions and in 1996, the Israel-dominated Congress unanimously passed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) which penalized the foreign companies and firms which invested in Iran's oil sector. On September 30, 2006 the act was renamed to Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) as it was no longer applied to Libya. George W. Bush administration was similarly antagonistic toward Iran and his administration adopted several rounds of sanctions against Iran's oil, gas, insurance, agriculture and aviation industries. He also signed into law the Iran Freedom and Support Act on September 30, 2006 which allocated USD 10 million to anti-Iranian terrorist groups.

Barack Obama who came to power with the flaunting and pompous promise of change was no better than his predecessors. Instead of taking up détente and reconciliation with Iran so as to find a sustainable solution to end the nuclear standoff, he assumed an aggressive position, intensified the sanctions, banned transactions with the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) and even created hurdles for Iran to receive the payments for its oil exports.

Existing sanctions on Iran's oil industry had been expanded "by making sanctionable the purchase or acquisition of Iranian petrochemical products", Obama said in a statement.

Measures would be taken against firms that have dealings with the National Iranian Oil Company and the Naftiran Inter-trade Company or that help Iran buy U.S. dollars or precious metals, he added.

But the sanctions are not the only means the U.S., Israel and the EU have resorted to in order to bring Iran to its knees and undermine its position as a regional superpower.

The Obama administration has vehemently pursued a policy of running covert ops in Iran through training, funding and assisting terrorists of anti-Iranian cults such as MKO and Jundallah with the objective of spreading fear and terror in the country, sabotaging its security and also impeding its nuclear program.

Since 2010, five scientists associated with Iran's nuclear program were assassinated, and the footsteps of CIA, Mossad and MKO can be traced in all the four killings.

On August 5, Iran's television aired confessions of several people involved in the killing of the country's nuclear scientists. The people who were introduced in a documentary titled "Terror Club" confessed that they received several weeks of military training as well as financial assistance from Israel to carry out their terrorist operations in Iran.

On May 15, 2012, Majid Jamali Fashi, a Mossad spy and terrorist who pleaded guilty and confessed to the killing of Dr. Masoud Alimohammadi, Iran's quantum field theorist and elementary-particle physicist was executed after describing in details all the stages of his involvement with Mossad, traveling to Israel through a neighboring country and carrying out his malicious operation. According to the Israeli paper Haaretz, Western intelligence confirmed that the detailed confession of Majid Jamali Fashi was genuine.

Damaging Iran's nuclear program through spreading sophisticated computer worms and malwares such as Stuxnet was another plot by the United States and Israel aimed at deliver a blow to Iran. In the late September, it was reported that Ralph Langer, a renowned expert on industrial systems security had admitted that the Stuxnet worm was coded to sabotage computers operating on Iran's Bushehr nuclear facilities.

All of these acts of aggression and belligerence are taking place while an intensive media operation against Iran is on track and the mainstream media, affiliated with AIPAC and other hawkish, pro-Israeli think tanks in the United States are mischievously portraying a biased, black and disappointing image of Iran to their people with the aim of laying the groundwork for a possible military invasion of Iran.

The war against Iran, however, seems to be already on the go. A soaring media operation, frequent war threats uttered by insane hawks in Tel Aviv and Washington, assassinations and acts of sabotage all testify that Iran is the target of an all-out war which just has not had a military representation. What can be said for sure is that Iran will not throw the towel in the face of the hostilities and has done a great job withstanding the lethal pressures. This is what makes Iran a promising model for the nations which want to learn how to stand on their own feet.

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- Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist. He has interviewed political commentator and linguist Noam Chomsky, member of New Zealand parliament Keith Locke, Australian politician Ian Cohen, member of German Parliament Ruprecht Polenz, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former U.S. National Security Council advisor Peter D. Feaver, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize laureate in biology Robin Warren, famous German political prisoner Ernst Zündel, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, American author Stephen Kinzer, syndicated journalist Eric Margolis, former aSiddiqiistant of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, former President of the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sid Ganis, American international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, American singer and songwriter David Rovics, American political scientist and anthropologist William Beeman, British journalist Andy Worthington, Australian author and blogger Antony Loewenstein, Iranian geopolitics expert Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, American historian and author Michael A. Hoffman II and Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon.