In a speech yesterday in the UAE, President Bush called Iran the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Now, to some, that might not sound unseemly, but it shouldn’t be overlooked that Iran is the UAE’s number one trading partner, which Bush completely failed to mention in the speech. Nor did he mention that the UAE is one of the most important conduits for Iranian imports despite US Sanctions, the fact that a significant Iranian ex-pats community that plays a central role in commerce in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, that human rights violations are commonplace in the UAE, or the fact that power is commonly inherited and that democratic development is, at best, a façade.

Instead, he praised the rulers of the UAE for luring foreign investment.

Dancing around such issues is not uncommon. Obviously the remarks regarding Iran were made for the sake of the Iranians and the American public, not necessarily those in attendance, some of whom took offense given their connections with Iran. Bush’s remarks regarding “free and just societies” were also not well received given that those he was addressing have absolutely nothing to gain by the implementation of serious democratic reforms.

With regards to the overtones of Mr. Bush’s speech, it should also not be overlooked that the UAE was one of only three nations to acknowledge the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan when it was in power, the very same group that the United States has accused the Iranians of militarily assisting. Of course, when the Taliban was in power, Tehran did not recognize it as the nation’s official government.

Beyond all of this, and the fact that there is always the issue of arms agreements lurking in the shadows during such visits passed off as joint security initiatives, there are also the contradictions that the United States is currently in negotiations with the Iranians with regards to Iraq, and that while the President is promoting “free and just societies” in the region, the United States is militarily occupying two of them.

Probably the most hypocritical, not to mention historically astonishing, statement made during the speech was…

“For decades, the people of this region saw their desire for liberty and justice denied at home and dismissed abroad in the name of stability. Today, your aspirations are threatened by violent extremists who murder the innocent in pursuit of power. They hate your government because it does not share their dark vision. They hate the United States because they know we stand with you in opposition to their brutal ambitions.”

Of course, the United States was, and still is, one of the leading nations with regards to supporting autocratic regimes in the region, something that people in the region have certainly not forgotten, even if people on this side of the world have. While the President talks freely of liberty and justice in the Middle East, the United States remains as committed as ever to their relationships with the ruling factions of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE. It recently penned an agreement promising $20 billion dollars worth of military aid over the next decade that all of them will benefit from, and yet the President, who has full knowledge of that fact still has the audacity to talk about “free and just societies”. Let’s also not overlook the fact that, by entering into such an agreement the United States had to counteract it by offering the Israelis $30 billion dollars in aid over the same period of time.

The goal of the President’s speech was to target the Iranians, and in doing so speak more so to his domestic audience than anyone else. Unlike those in the region in which he gave the address, domestic perceptions regarding the ‘threat’ that Iran posses are primarily formed based on the constant stream of alarming information provided by the administration and others in the government. The same cannot be said for your average person on the street in the UAE.

This leads us to the inevitable question – is Iran truly the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism?

Examining who has been behind most of the international attacks since the mid 1990’s, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Iran has no affiliation with al-Qaeda or groups linked to it. It does not, unlike elements within Saudi Arabia, Libya, the UAE, and Syria, support the efforts of Jihadists in Iraq, it’s primary link being with militant Shi’ite groups, some of which have substantial influence within Iraq’s Interior Ministry itself – which means the armed forces and police. Thus, if anything, it is guilty of supporting factions within Iraq’s most predominant group, the very same group that did not play a significant role in the rise of the Sunni based insurgency, and one that has, since sectarian tensions came to a head, conducted violent campaigns against Sunnis, which constitute the majority of the insurgency and Jihadist groups whose ranks are replete with foreign fighters.

If anything, Iranian interference in Iraq has been solely based on aiding radical aspects of the Shi’ite population who have had links with Tehran since before the US invasion of the country.

Looking abroad, there is no arguing the fact that Iran supports Hezbullah and other such groups. In truth, though still indefensible, their support of such groups has been largely aimed at helping them in their struggles against other regional powers, many of whom are backed by foreign powers, in an attempt to consolidate power and expand their influence, something that, like it or not, the United States helped write the handbook on.

Also rather telling is this passage…

“They hate the United States because they know we stand with you in opposition to their brutal ambitions.”

Like the people of Chile stood with the United States against the ‘brutal ambitions’ of Salvador Allende, their fears erased when the CIA helped engineer the coup that put Pinochet in power who then went about ‘disappearing’ tens of thousand of Chileans?

Next to the covert global foreign policy undertakings of the United States, Iran is a snow white virgin by comparison. And don’t think that the United States hasn’t endeavored to sponsor terrorists either. In 2005, Luis Posada was held in Texas on the charge of Illegal Presence. The charges were later dropped. While the US Justice Department requested that the court keep Posada in jail because he was, of his own admission, the mastermind behind numerous terrorist attacks, Posada was neither charged with crimes relating to those admissions, nor was a Venezuelan extradition request approved because the a US Immigration judge ruled that were he to be extradited he would face torture.

In 1976, Luis Posada, a long-time asset of the CIA with links to the Cuban American National Foundation, a CIA shill, masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 76 innocent people. He was also involved in the 1997 bombing of numerous Cuban hotels and nigh clubs. While being found guilty in absentia for numerous terrorist attacks and unrealized plots. Ironically, unlike those being held at Guantanamo, Posada was granted his rights under the Constitution with regards to his seizure and the legal proceedings that followed.

The truth is, the United States has another word for ‘terrorist’ when they are the ones producing them. They tend to call them ‘assets’ or ‘paramilitaries’, many of which were trained at the notorious School Of The Americas [1], whose graduates include Manuel Noriega, Cid Diaz, and others used in violent operations by proxy regimes in Latin America.

So is Iran the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism? Have they perhaps been gifted that title because they are a powerful player in a region in which the United States currently finds itself militarily and politically treading water? Is the President’s rhetoric an attempt to whitewash the recent findings of the recent National Intelligence Estimate? Is Iran a nation stupid enough to engage in a clandestine nuclear weapons program with the whole world watching and then provide a nuclear weapon to a terrorist organization? Would they be stupid enough to do it were they not being scrutinized? What are the actual logistics involved in employing a nuclear device capable of causing serious damage? Can such a device be contained within a backpack? And if that is a possibility, and something of that nature did occur, is the Iranian government stupid enough to believe that an immediate retaliation of vastly greater proportions wouldn’t be rained down upon them in the event that it happened? And if they aren’t that stupid, would they seriously consider gifting such a device to a terrorist group? Would members of the Revolutionary Guard do it, knowing full well that by doing it they would be forfeiting their lives and the lives of perhaps millions of others, their families included?

I have written about this in the past, so won’t bother retracing my steps, but consider this. The United States has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Its destructive power is so great that even a portion of it could render this planet completely uninhabitable. They have the ability to launch weapons from domestic and foreign silos, from aircraft, and from naval vessels. In fact, a single Ohio Class nuclear submarine could devastate the Iranian population and launch its compliment from the Gulf providing little to no warning whatsoever. In truth, they could park themselves 20 miles off the Iranian coast and launch submerged and no one would know a thing until it was all over.

This world might be home to moronic fanatics that don’t care about their own lives because of religious zealotry, but they have to get their guns and ammo from somewhere. Those that provide them their wares usually aren’t the sort that are stupid enough to completely overlook what would befall them were they to hand over a nuclear device.

Now, we can claim that by employing preemptive military force we can assure something of that nature won’t occur. Then again, we’re not prepared to deal with Pakistan, which has an arsenal of its own, and whose military establishment has longstanding ties with known militant organizations. Unlike Iran, it’s a nation in chaos, one in which terrorist attacks have been on the rise, and one in which elements of the Taliban, and groups sympathetic to their plight, operate largely unhindered. And while there has been a great deal of talk regarding the uncertainty that the unrest in Pakistan has produced, it is not seen as the sort of threat that Iran is.

Demonizing Iran is, in truth, wholly to the benefit of the United States. It remains the most powerful nation in the region opposed to the US occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan. By supplanting a friendly regime in Tehran, the United States would, in essence, created a unified operational area stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. And that reality is something that, in all of this, has remained largely overlooked.