After the recent Strait of Hormuz incident (where five Iranian speedboats allegedly "harassed" three United States Navy ships), George Bush reminded the world that Iran remains "a threat to world peace." Not America, the global belligerent that spends more on military expenditures than the rest of the world combined and is the principal practitioner of state-sponsored terrorism, but Iran.
He said this without irony or reflection and appeared to take himself quite seriously. Yet, the idea that Iran, a country with a gross domestic product less than one-third the United States' war budget, is a threat to world peace and not the other way around is laughable. Indeed, the amount Iran spends on its entire military for one year is equivalent to what the United States wastes slaughtering civilians in Iraq in 17 days.
World opinion - what Noam Chomsky has called the "second superpower" - bears this out as well, as a Pew Global Attitudes Project report from June 2006 (the most recent available) demonstrates that nearly every country polled views the United States as the greatest danger to world peace.
None of this should be surprising, however, to a dispassionate observer aware of what their country is actually doing. But therein lies the problem: actions of empire are rarely reported as such, and when they are, they are almost always accompanied by grandiose proclamations of nobility and virtuous behavior from the aggressor. "Spreading democracy" and "making the world safe for freedom" are two slogans popular with contemporary terrorist regimes as they litter civilian streets with cluster bombs. With democracy like that, who needs fascism?
The foundation for how the United States has become the greatest threat to world peace is discussed by Chalmers Johnson in his new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic." Therein he conservatively catalogued the worldwide number of United States military bases at 737, with some estimates and calculations exceeding 1,000. This global empire of ours employs 2.5 million United States personnel and functions as the shadow cast over every bargaining table where an American corporate or colonial interest sits. And even when the niceties of economic strangulation or coercion call for something slightly more diplomatic than force, the World Bank, World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund - what University of Cambridge economics professor Ha-Joon Chang has deemed the "Unholy Trinity" - operate merely as an extension of the United States Treasury Department, and therefore of American corporate interests.
Nevertheless, Iran is held up as the bete noire of "civilized" society, which generally just includes the terrorist states of Israel and the world tyrant, largely because of its pursuit in nonviolent self-defense. An exercise in empathy is quite demonstrative of the unjust nature of this point: Imagine that the most powerful country in the world, Iran, invaded Mexico because Mexico required evidence of guilt before extraditing suspects Iran wanted in connection with a criminal investigation (note: the use of force to bring about political goals is the textbook definition of international terrorism). Further, imagine Iran then preventively invaded Canada, which has the second largest known oil reserves in the world, on the patently and demonstrably false pretext that Canada had and sought to use weapons of mass destruction (note: a war of aggression, what was called the "supreme international crime" at Nuremburg, is defined as any war not out of self-defense). Next, imagine that Iran was fear-mongering its population for war with the United States, introduced a resolution in its deliberative body naming the United States military a terrorist organization (which it undoubtedly is), and patrolled the Great Lakes with its unmatched naval threat. As a petty, powerless country without a nuclear deterrent, what would and should the United States do? In reality, what would and should we expect Iran to do?
This imaginative exercise clearly demonstrates the absurdity of United States hostility towards Iran, that is, if we disregard operational principles central to the United States government: namely, aggression, hostility and violence committed against the United States are the supreme evils of the world; aggression, hostility and violence committed by the United States should be viewed as noble exercises of restraint for the benefit of a savage, uncivilized world population.
The aggressor's standard - that which applies to you does not apply to me - is nothing new. Indeed, Thucydides explicated the principle some 2,400 years ago: "the strong do as they may while the weak accept what they must." But because this is the operative principle of the United States government, and because the United States has an extensive, functional empire it has shown no timidity about using, the United States - not Iran - must be seen as the principal, if not single, threat to world peace.
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