May’s latest column for Scripps Howard and the National Review contains some advice for recently elevated Republican House Committee chairs. (You can listen to it!) He gives a “very brief [...]]]>
May’s latest column for Scripps Howard and the National Review contains some advice for recently elevated Republican House Committee chairs. (You can listen to it!) He gives a “very brief briefing” on the Islamo-threat and, because Iran is the top priority of neoconservatives (especially May’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies), May starts off his briefing with this little-known fact: “In 1979, there was a revolution in Iran.”
Then May gets into it:
Iran is a predominately Shia country but its revolution inspired the rise of militant groups among the more numerous Sunni Muslims of the broader Middle East as well. Al-Qaeda is only the best known.
Sunni jihadis and Shia jihadis are rivals, not enemies. They cooperate and collaborate against common enemies — us, for example. The evidence for this is abundant.
This is a tack May has tried before: linking Iran and Al Qaeda under the “jihadi” banner. The reasoning, from his hawkish perspective on Iran, makes perfect sense: Almost everyone agrees that the U.S. should be taking severe measures against Al Qaeda; ergo, if Iran and Al Qaeda are the same thing, the U.S. should be taking ever-more-severe actions against Iran as well.
In his latest piece doling out advice to Congress, May hints at measures beyond sanctions (my emphasis):
Make up your mind that the jihadis in Tehran will not acquire nuclear weapons — not on your watch. The sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 2010 are an important part of the effort but only a part.
Final point: 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden is alive. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a plan. Are you confident the U.S. has an adequate strategy for frustrating their ambitions?
But the Islamic Republic of Iran and Al Qaeda are not the same thing, as any honest expert in either will tell you. The two actually hate each other.
The connection that May peddles, meanwhile, is just as tenuous as when he made it about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in September 2002, as hawks were ramping up their effort to go to war with that country. He’s even made the same spurious accusation about Iran already, in an article for National Review last fall.
As for substantiating his argument with evidence in any of these cases, May has never really gone beyond ‘Well, they’re all jihadis!’
]]>Here’s an excerpt:
Given the broad consensus that Osama bin Laden and Co. carried out the 9/11 attacks, it’s easy to understand that mentioning his group continues to elicit strong emotions — among them fear, anger, and a resulting desire to continue to wage war against Al Qaeda.
So when hawks are trying to drum up support for a war in the Middle East, it’s natural for them to try to connect the target country with Al Qaeda. This pattern was easily observable in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Cliff May, having already morphed from a journalist into the president of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies by 2002, opted to paint with a broad brush: linking people together because they think alike. They’re “Jihadists,” he wrote, and that was enough to slap bull’s eyes on a wide variety of Arab and Muslim heads.
The Jihadist framework even allowed him, as he outlined in a September 2002 column for the Scripps Howard News Service, to “easily accommodate true religious fanatics such as Osama bin Laden as well as those like Saddam Hussein…”
[...]
As his [new NRO article conflating Iran and Al Qaeda] draws to a close, May gets even more specific about the “Jihadi” connections: Iran, he says, is working toward fulfilling Al Qaeda’s “mission”:
Al-Qaeda and the terrorist groups it leads have a mission. Iran’s revolutionary theocrats and the terrorist groups they instruct have goals and a strategy to achieve them.
Then comes a thinly veiled threat of a military attack against Iran: “Iran’s rulers should be under the guns — metaphorically for the present….” But the present, too, shall pass. And when it does, May, pressed by Glenn Greenwald, has made his policy preferences clear.
The “Al Qaeda link” lives on, with just as little evidence as there was in Iraq. Secular Arab nationalists, Sunnis, Shiites — all the same: “Jihadis.” “Al Qaeda and Iran,” the mantra goes, and emotions will run high. It remains to be seen if the U.S. public will fall for the ruse again.
Read the whole piece here at AlterNet.
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