By Dennis Broe
‘The first casualty of war is the truth’, was spoken in one of its iterations by a senator in 1918 appalled at a new level of censorship in the U.S. after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. In this new ‘war to end all wars’, the corporate media censorship of truth is even heavier and done in broad daylight, so that truth is not just a casualty, but a fatality.
The lies are more transparent in what Max Blumenthal has termed Operation: Epstein Fury, as opposed to Trump’s G.I. Joe 4th-grade-level Sergeant Rock cartoonish ‘Operation: Epic Fury’. In this war, where the excuses are a rerun of the Iraq war ‘weapons of mass destruction’, in both cases false, it is truly second time as farce, though for both Iraq and Iran the result is tragedy.
Woodrow Wilson dragged the U.S. into the First World War as a “war to end all wars,” and one of the rationales in this one is that finally the Iran threat will be ended. However, there is a new meaning to ‘war to end all wars’ because as the U.S.-Russia nuclear treaties are allowed to expire by the U.S., and as Israel could unleash its atomic bombs at any point, we come closer in any of these U.S.-provoked conflagrations, be it Ukraine, Taiwan or Iran, to war to end all wars meaning the destruction of humankind.
Let’s look at the reasons for the war. The U.S., on its side, is not necessarily fighting Iran but rather is positioning itself for the coming war with China, having first cut off China’s access to Venezuelan oil with the capturing of Maduro and now desiring in its attack on Iran to itself control access to the Strait of Hormuz ,so it can control Middle East oil access to China. Meanwhile, in a double-pronged attack, in Europe NATO is boarding Russian tankers to attempt to cut off another source of Chinese oil.
The senseless attack on Iran is thus about what U.S. policy in the Middle East has always been about – at least since 1953 when the CIA along with British MI6 overthrew Mossadegh – and that is oil. Ultimately this war is about control of the world’s energy supply as the most effective way of maintaining fading U.S. hegemony.
It’s also about protecting the profits accruing to U.S. oil companies from control of this supply, which also began in ’53 when the U.S. after effecting the coup then ‘opened’ Iran’s oil not just to British Petroleum, which prior to the nationalization had simply stolen the oil, reputedly not paying a penny for it, but also now to U.S. companies, America’s reward for spearheading the coup.
You will hear little of this in the U.S. media, inflamed with its holy war against so-called ‘backward, Muslim’ Iran, openly stated on Fox News but on the more ‘liberal’ media argued under the banner of ‘democracy.’ The effect though is the same, supporting the destruction of the Iranian Revolution, whose primary crime is active resistance to U.S. imperialism and Israeli settler colonialism.
There are of course smaller, pettier reasons for the war. On the Israeli side, not only to keep Netanyahu and his far-right Zionist coalition in power but also to continue to shield him from an almost certain Israeli court condemnation for corruption, a sword of Damocles that hangs over his head. On the U.S. side, ‘Epstein Fury’ is the diversion that sidelines the Epstein investigation and replaces global headlines about a corrupt Israeli-U.S. paedophile regime, nay system, that encompasses not only Trump and past U.S. administrations but also the heads of the financial and tech worlds. Epstein Fury has two meanings, that is, the fury by the American and Israeli paedophile elite that they were being called into question which then leads to their fury unleased against a country that never threated the U.S. and that plunges the world into economic chaos.
The targeting of at least 165 school girls in Minab is a further escalation of the crimes against young women by the Epstein regime, first rape and now murder. The Muslim girls’ school recommences on Saturdays, the day the bombs struck and, in its targeting, recalls the Nazi deliberate bombing of the market place in Guernica on everyone’s shopping day, the horror of which Picasso expressed so vividly (above). That’s what the bombing means to the Iranian families; to the U.S. warmongers Saturday was also the day to start this war of choice because the bond markets were closed, and thus wouldn’t react until Monday, by which time they figured the war would be over.
A huge beneficiary from the war already is Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who after a quick apology for his supposed involvement in Epstein’s world of underage trafficking, with the war’s onset, secured a Pentagon contract with Open AI, Microsoft’s partner, after another AI company Anthropic, refused the contract because it claimed the Pentagon wanted to use AI to spy on American citizens. Spying on American citizens is apparently just fine with Bill Gates, though Sam Altman, the head of Open AI, claims there are now ‘safeguards’ in place, a claim that will probably make Edward Snowden turn over in his media grave, since he like all truthtellers is silenced in the corporate media.
While you were watching the already biased coverage of the war, Larry Ellison, the largest personal donor to Israel’s IDF which has led the Gaza genocide, and his son David, took over Warner Brothers, giving them access to CNN and completing what I have called a far-right Zionist ‘media coup’. They now control or have major interests in CBS, CNN, Tik Tok, which had introduced the genocide to American youth, and which has now expunged those videos, as well as Comedy Central. Soon even the WBs Batman will be fighting ‘Arab terrorists’ and Superman will soon stand for ‘Truth, Justice and the Zionist Way’.
Let’s look at the corporate media coverage. The propaganda is at such a level that when the Iranian foreign minister appeared on the major networks explaining that Iran was striking back in self-defence, one corporate media quisling then asked why they would attack foreign countries and he had to explain that Iran was attacking U.S. bases in those countries from where missiles and drones were launched against them, and that was their lawful right to protect themselves. The idea in the corporate media being that anything short of abject surrender is Iranian aggression.
On CNN, the supposed neutral, straight-ahead network, retired Army Brigadier General Steve Anderson, while discussing perhaps erroneously how Iran’s missile launching ability is being degraded, called the country’s inhabitants ‘Uranians’ as if they were from another planet which for him, since they are not in the American/Israeli orbit, they are.
Corporate media, in subservience to their petroleum industry backers, also explain the polls in an exaggerated way, showing again on CNN that Republican support is 87 to 13 percent in favor and Democrats oppose it, thus normalizing the dissent, and not pointing out that the majority of American voters are independents and that before the war 80 percent of U.S. voters opposed it, that is confining the war to the two-party system, which the largest percentage of U.S. voters are not part of.
In navigating corporate media, one of the first similarities between the supposed vast difference between the ‘right-wing’ Fox News, the ‘centre’ CNN, and the ‘left’ MSNBC is that it is difficult to find any moment when all three—whose median audience age ranges from 67 to 70—are not on a commercial break. The news is fitted around and made to conform to the selling imperative which also includes plugging their own network, even as the ratings fall on all three. ‘Desert Storm’ featured the emergence of CNN, the Iraq war was about the dominance of Fox, while Epstein Fury may be about the emergence of alternative news and podcasts over the most dominant ratings-wise network, YouTube, which in daytime dwarfs all three. The news networks even follow the trend, pioneered in sports, of a series of ads, followed by a few seconds’ preview of what is to come, followed by more ads.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a female anchor looking like Hilary Clinton explained that the war which Israel and the U.S. started ‘was to stabilize Iran to where it was no threat’, leaving off that one of the reasons for the timing of the war was that Iran had made major concessions to the U.S. around its nuclear program and the war was started the day these concessions were to be announced in order to circumvent the negotiation. The Hilary Clinton lookalike then wondered ‘who was going to take over the leadership’, when the war ended, echoing the liberal hope for ‘democracy’ in Iran, that is democracy at the barrel of a gun, when really what the U.S. is hoping for, and the media is cheering on, a la Hilary Clinton on Libya, is a failed and divided oil state that the U.S. can plunder.
CNN then dragged out Brett McGurk, the former National Security Council Advisor, who is partly responsible for George W. Bush’s illegal war on Iraq and the never ending war in Afghanistan. He explained that the campaign was to stop Iran ‘from spreading terrorism all over its borders’, which as a country more accurately describes Israel, at war at various times with Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Iran, Iraq and Yemen.
On Fox, following a press conference in which the aptly named Secretary of War Pete Hegseth practically declared the war won, because the U.S. now controlled Iran air space, a press conference designed to make an upcoming vote by Congress on Trump’s circumvention of the War Powers Act obsolete since the Pentagon declared the war over, the network responded with its ‘expert’, Jack Keane.
The former vice chief of staff, who along with Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and Nancy Pelosi is a hawkish supporter of the cultish Iranian overthrow group MEK, then echoed the sentiment that Iran could no longer strike back, but this was interrupted by cutting to Tel Aviv where a correspondent wearing a flak jacket and helmet could barely be heard over the sounds of sirens signaling incoming Iranian missiles. A blonde Pam Bondi-esque anchor than termed the Israeli terrorist attack on Lebanese doctors and nurses through exploding hospital pagers ‘a triumph’
Finally, the network cut to an ad extolling the powers of Botox to manage chronic migraines, with of course no mention of that fact that it was the threat of global war, economic meltdown, and the corporate media’s benign, unwavering and undifferentiated downplaying of those threats, which may be inducing migraines.
The best, most varied and accurate coverage of this war is by Al Jazeera, available all day online, which after the Hegseth presser mentioned that the attacks on Iran were, as in Iraq, also attacks on its hospitals and heritage sites. It also ran a crawl underneath the anchor that mentioned a U.N. report focused on illegal Israeli acts and finally noted the similarity between Hegseth’s glib announcing the war was over and George W. Bush’s Iraq ‘declaration of victory that didn’t succeed’.
A propos YouTube, a word of caution and some recommendations. YouTube is owned by Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a spinoff company that has contracted, despite employee resistance, with the Pentagon. The network is thus at the moment open, though this is subject to change. Recommended podcasts for alternative views of the war are George Galloway’s Mother of All Talk Shows, Max Blumenthal’s The Grey Zone and for a global economic perspective Dialogue Works with Michael Hudson and Richard Woolf.
This article is a preview of Episode 3 of Lies, More Lies and Damned Media Lies.
