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    Re: Noam Chomsky: Trump Is Trying to Exploit Tension With Iran for 2020 Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on January 6, 2020, 11:43 pm, in reply to "Noam Chomsky: Trump Is Trying to Exploit Tension With Iran for 2020"

    The idea of Iran "expanding their influence" figures large as a concept as well: it's a standard reflex projection of how all empires think in terms of how they would operate, but in my view its mistaken to see Iran in this way. Its not about creating an alternative empire controlled by Iran but merely about survival by mutual assistance.

    Exactly, Ken. It's like he's creating an image of one empire against another, whereas Iran's alliances are about resistance and survival, not expansion and control. Their neighbour has been subjected to thirty years of genocide. It's a similar mischaracterization when he says "Hezbollah serves Iranian interests." Hezbollah is part of the legitimate resistance to US empire in the region. To describe that as serving "Iranian interests" is to throw a huge sop to the US establishment narrative which Chomsky has spent a lifetime obliterating. Disappointing.

    And the comments about why Iran, unlike Cuba, does not pose "the threat of a good example" seem equally self-contradictory. He says:

    "— the problem with Cuba is “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,” which has great appeal to others in the region who are suffering from the same circumstances as Cuba was under the U.S.-backed Batista regime.
    That’s dangerous. The idea that people have the right to take things into their own hands and separate themselves from U.S. domination is not going to be acceptable. That’s successful defiance.

    That's the same thing Iran did. It took matters into its own hands by electing Mossadegh who nationalized the oil. Then when the US got rid of him, it took matters into its own hands by overthrowing their sock-puppet dictator. They "separate[d] themselves from US domination". They engaged in "successful defiance". That's a good example for other countries in the region, and an intolerable one. That it was theocratic as opposed to secular-democratic was a direct result of the US coup, as Chomsky has pointed out elsewhere. As you say the truly "rotten" governments are the ones that back US hegemony, usually through mass murder, torture and terror. Whatever the Iranian government's crimes they pale into insignificance beside Israel's or Saudi Arabia's.

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