A Small Dose of Common Sense

Gosh, this sounds reasonable:

Israel promised Russia it would not launch an attack on Iran, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview aired on Sunday in which he described such an assault as "the worst thing that can be imagined."

Israel has hinted it could forcibly deny Iran the means to make an atomic bomb if it refuses to suspend uranium enrichment and has criticized Russia for agreeing to supply to Tehran S-300 anti-aircraft weapons that could complicate an attack.

In an interview with CNN recorded on Tuesday, Medvedev denied Moscow was backing Iran but said it had the right to supply defensive weapons and said sanctions against Tehran should only be used as a last resort.

An attack would lead to "a humanitarian disaster, a vast number of refugees, Iran's wish to take revenge and not only upon Israel, to be honest, but upon other countries as well," Medvedev said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

"But my Israeli colleagues told me that they were not planning to act in this way and I trust them."

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure I can place as much trust as Medvedev does in the word of the Israeli government, especially since Joe Biden appeared to indicate in July that the U.S. government would do nothing to stop an Israeli first strike against Iran. Of course, we're talking about Joe "Ready to Gaffe" Biden here. But although the Obama administration distanced itself from those remarks - with the President personally saying the U.S. had "absolutely not" given Israel permission to attack - you have to wonder, given the Beltway establishment's unrelenting push for war with Iran and Obama's own penchant for saying one thing while doing another.

Throughout all of this, I can't help but appreciate the role Russia continues to play as a bulwark against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although I'm no great fan of Vladimir Putin and the corrupt, authoritarian-leaning government he heads, I understand his popularity among Russians who might desire a more traditional strongman after the economic chaos of the 1990s, the grotesque failures of free market "reforms" masterminded by Larry Summers, and the international embarrassment embodied in booze-addled political opportunist Boris Yeltsin. Following the Cold War, the boost to American exceptionalism provided by the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of a "unipolar" global order found its most odious expression in the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush administration. Although the neoconservatives have been largely discredited by foreign policy disasters like Iraq, their noxious worldview continues to thoroughly infect mainstream political discourse in the United States, with the result that Beltway conventional wisdom is often predicated on their warmongering interpretations of daily events - which of course then finds its way into that ultimate vehicle for establishment-approved political thought, the Obama administration.

As a result, whenever the American media-industrial complex attempts to push a factually false, but politically convenient meme - such as the idea that the 2008 South Ossetia conflict was unprovoked and entirely attributable to Russian aggression, rather than a response to Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili's ill-advised offensive into the breakaway province - it's nice to have Russian opinion providing a counterbalance. Yes, it's just another great power protecting its own geostrategic interests, but with the percentage of blatant lies clogging up American political discourse getting thicker all the time, Russian interests will often lead that country's spokespersons wading into the realm of fact. It's a refreshing alternative, but it also underlines the extent to which, in the propaganda-soaked post-9/11 media wasteland, the United States plutocracy has largely made a mockery of the idea that its public relations channels (or "news networks", as the euphemism would have it) resemble anything like a free press. As in any other authoritarian state, the American media serves the interests of powerful elites. It's just a question of which state's bullshit you choose to believe.