Contrary to the advertisement banner at the top of the frontpage, Iran is not threatening the US. The Iranian military isn't actively killing American soldiers. The Bush administration tried claiming in 2007 that Tehran was funneling weapons to Iraq and even the Taliban but these are unproven accusations -- Juan Cole has called it the New Yellowcake Scandal.
The purpose of such accusations is to build up momentum for invasion, and is reminiscent of the 45-minute claim made by Bush and Blair or the mushroom cloud scare tactics of Condoleeza Rice.
Cole says here:
Sunni Arab guerrillas are increasingly deploying explosively formed projectiles, roadside bombs that can pierce even tank armor. My guess is that the more sophisticated EFPs supposedly coming only from Iran are also sometimes made in Iraq, and that any Iranian ones are on the black market and could be bought by anyone, including Sunni groups.
Look at the left and right side of your screen: an M-16 rifle, barrel down, is topped by a helmet--clearly a gravemarker for a soldier. A caption floating above mentions Iran and the money it's using "against us." In the background a military Humvee or armored vehicle with flames interposed in the distance between.
The skin is warmongering and alarmist and utterly irresponsible.
There are better ways to encourage this community to get behind clean energy climate legislation; making false claims about Iran hurting American troops is counterproductive and destroys the credibility of the Vote Vets or Operation Free.
We've lost over 4000 soldiers and have unleashed death on over a million civilians in that country since our invasion in 2003.
The 72 million men, women, and children of Iran don't hate us or wish us harm. They want to live their lives. Many of us don't understand their situation or their culture. When we brand another group as the "other" and attribute intentions to them, especially belligerent ones, we fall into the traps of politicians and thugs. The human species, we have seen, is vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Chris Hedges has written about this in his excellent War Is A Force, which I often return to.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is an intentional and persistent effort to try to cast Iran as the perpetual threat. Iran's nuclear technology is over-hyped. It will never threaten or dare to attack Israel (which has one of the top 5 most powerful militaries in the world AND nuclear weapons) or the US.
It wouldn't make any sense.
I never expected DKos to disseminate such unfounded information for profit. The progressive community has long been anti-war profiteer.
From Chris Hedges
And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually.
There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die.
Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight.
But we became a better country for it. A much better country. Gradually war's good name if we can, between quotes, can say was resurrected. Certainly during the Reagan Era. Granada, Panama. Culminating with the Persian Gulf War, where a war — the very essence of war was hidden from us. And the essence of war is death. War is necrophilia. That's what it is.
Why not look at arms trade and the military-industrial-congressional complex? Back in 1995, John Pilger reported on Britain's role in world of international arms dealing.
How much oil does the US get from Iran?
Government website listing the US Total Crude Oil and Products Imports
The skin says that for every dollar increase in oil -- crude oil is $82 a barrel as of 11AM Friday -- Iran gets $1.5 billion dollars to "use against us." What's the source or accuracy of these figures?
Why not question the policies of the energy companies? Is it any coincidence that the top 10 richest companies in the world include at least 7 which are involved in petroleum and oil? They earn the profits -- many more times than the Sheikhs or the Arabs who are widely hated in the US -- and the poor people of the world (our young men and women, and the people of oil-rich countries) suffer the externalities. Just as in war.