— Countercurrents

ON JANUARY 3, 2020, the US military, following president Trump’s orders, killed Major General Qassim Suleimani, respected leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Groups’ Quds Force.

I never understood the morality of foreign policy, but I’m getting the hang of it, thanks to the little-known pocket manual ‘The US Holy Code Book of Double Standard Morality.’

According to US Code, US troops’ killing of Suleimani is honourable because he’s considered responsible for killing Americans, but if Iranians were to kill his American equivalent, the CIA director, whose role in killing is not subject to evaluation, this would be reprehensible.

Similarly, crippling Iran with sanctions is considered sensible. Consider what the 1990–2003 sanctions did to Iraq: By 1997, 500,000 children had died from malnutrition. Sewage spilled into rivers, causing typhoid and dysentery epidemics. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and their livestock died from lack of medicine. Crime soared. Families drank contaminated water and ate bread of flour and wood dust in homes without electricity.

US Code says such sanctions are for the best, but similar sanctions against Americans for the illegal coups, torture, drone attacks, invasions, and other international crimes of their unbridled government would be heartless.

US possession of 4,000 nukes, we are told, ensures security, as does US contamination of Afghanistan, Iraq, and US troops with radioactive depleted uranium. With the exception of an alarmed John F. Kennedy’s adamant opposition, Israel’s secret possession of an estimated 80 nukes has also been considered a blessing. Iranian nuclear development, however, is reckless.

According to US Code, the British Balfour Declaration’s granting a homeland to Zionist Jews in Palestine was benevolent, but Britain’s goal of limiting Zionist immigration so as not to displace peasant Arabs was malevolent.

Zionists’ forceful displacement or killing by 1949 of one million Arabs is dismissed as benign. Moreover, the Jewish extremist organisations that terrorised Britain during WWII for trying to limit Zionist immigration – the Stern Gang led by Yitzhak Shamir and the Irgun led by Menachem Begin — were evidently so chivalrous that both leaders became Israeli prime ministers. But anyone, including Iranian-supported Hamas, who militantly supports the Balfour Declaration’s forgotten pledge to protect non-Jewish Palestinians’ rights is a terrorist.

During both World Wars, the Allies’ invasions of neutral Iran for oil and railroads were noble-minded. And while Iran’s failure to willingly open its borders to help the Allies was deemed self-centred, US failure to open its borders to help thousands of Jews escape Nazi extermination was considered only prudent to preserve American jobs and Protestant culture.

In the 1950s, profit-seeking foreign corporations who dominated Iran’s economy were kind, while Iranians who tried to remove foreign infiltration were selfish. Consequently, US engineering conglomerate Overseas Consultants Inc.’s lucrative plan, represented by future CIA Director Allen Dulles, to develop Iran for the Shah was enlightening, but Mohammed Mossadegh’s popular nationalist movement that rejected funding for the plan was lowdown, as was his 1951 nationalisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

US Code maintains that the CIA’s 1953 toppling of the highly popular Mossadegh by bribing newspapers to publish anti-Mossadegh articles, paying mullahs to condemn Mossadegh, developing a network of anti-Mossadegh military commanders, buying an Iranian mob to create a pro-Shah parade, paying gangs to terrorise Teheran, and killing 300 Iranians in the process was clever, as was the US government’s re-installing the Shah with his oppression, greed, and massive procurement of US weapons.

On the other hand, Iranian students’ taking Americans hostage in 1979, with one student shouting, ‘We will teach the CIA not to interfere with our country,’ was inappropriate. And while Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of the oligarchy of Kuwait was inexcusable and warranted the one-sided slaughter of a US counter invasion in 1991, his 1980 invasion of Iran and use of chemical weapons were convenient and merited US assistance.

US holy code instructs us that while some killing is bad, other killing is good. US-supported Israel’s killing of Arabs is good. Iranian-supported Hezbollah’s killing of Israelis is bad. US-supported Saudi Arabia’s killing of Houthi Yemenis is good. Iranian-supported Houthi Yemenis’ killing of Yemenis is bad.

Militarily surrounding Iran — with US troops and bases to the East in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the North in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, to the West in Turkey, Iraq, and Kuwait, and to the South in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman — is something that Iran should serenely take in stride.

But the USSR’s planned deployment of missiles in Cuba in 1962 is cause for WWIII, and the potential for North Korean missiles to reach the US coast is justification for enormous alarm if not a US invasion. According to the holy code, those who do not allow themselves to remain vulnerable to US attack are only proving their malice.

9/11 was appalling when terrorists killed 3,000 primarily US civilians, but the killing of more than 300,000 Mid-Eastern civilians and more than 250,000 Mid-Eastern opposition forces in post-9/11 US war zones only brings us closer to worldwide justice, harmony, and freedom.

Iran, like some US-funded allies, has a despicable problem of internal oppression and torture. But let’s look at international behaviour. Has Iran ever done to the US and Britain what they’ve done to Iran? Did Iran ever invade them? Did it topple a US president? Did it train US internal security forces as the CIA trained the Shah’s brutal SAVAK?

So why does any US politician have the right to condemn Iran as aggressive and deserving of attack? By what logic can any US politician insist that the US has proven its right to retain sovereignty and possess nuclear weapons while Iran has not?

When has Iran ever harmed another nation more than it has harmed itself?

But US holy code says that line of reasoning is irrelevant.

While Iran’s strict oppression, systematic torture of Iranian prisoners, and funding of militants abroad are deplorable and hurt Iranians by depleting Iran’s budget, the US depletion of the American budget by spending trillions on invasions, committing coups, establishing black sites abroad, dismissing judicial rights prior to arrest and imprisonment, ignoring all rights prior to execution, terrorising the Mid-East with drones, funding dirty wars in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and exporting US weapons worldwide is high-minded.

Above all, US holy code declares: Muslims seeking to base their government upon the Sharia — often in reaction to corruption and oppression — are nothing but crazy extremists whose interpretation of religion provokes them to behave with violent cruelty.

But we can rest assured that US presidents, policymakers, and occupation leaders who feel convinced their coups and invasions are blessed by God and their nation is specially created by God with a mission to bring freedom and light to the world — these noble Americans advocate violence that has a divine purpose, like the violence of those US troops who, prior to brutally attacking Fallujah, were told by their navy chaplain the absurd logic that they, like Jesus entering Jerusalem, are tools of mercy, in a spiritual battle to break the bounds of Hell.

What I find most troublesome about double standard morality is that when morality is determined by the identity of the actor and not the act, you’ve got a cruel case of selfish immorality and a dangerous sense of divinely inspired self-righteousness that hamstring our ability to ever achieve understanding and peace with the enemy.

But don’t think too hard about all that. Just keep your thinking shallow, swallow what you’re told, and soon you won’t resist the US holy code.

Countercurrents.org, March 10. Kristin Young Christman is a contributing author to the forthcoming anthology Bending the Arc: Striving for Peace and Justice in the Age of Endless War.