"The Great Iran Lie and the
Persian Gulf Catastrophe"
by David Stockman
"What is going on in the Persian Gulf is rotten beyond words. The rogue madman in the Oval Office has detonated a conflagration there that could send the entire global economy and financial system spiraling into a catastrophe - and not just because or even mainly due to the 23 million barrels of oil per day at risk out of 105 million needed worldwide.
What’s really at risk is the underlying global financial system. The latter is a veritable house of cards sitting upon a mountain of debt, leverage, and speculative excess. So it may not have the capacity or resilience to withstand a sudden $200 per barrel oil shock.
Yet and yet. The whole insanely reckless act of launching a sweeping military attack on a nation of 90 million people that had zero capacity to impose military harm on the home territory of the United States is predicated on one of the Great Big Stinking Lies of History - namely, that the Iranian regime is a uniquely evil stain on the face of the earth and has spent 47 years bringing injury, mayhem, and death to America and much of the region around it.
The truth, however, is that there’s nothing especially unique about Iran’s manifold sins at all. It’s just another run-of-the-mill authoritarian state run by a medieval theocracy that has imposed one of the most benighted tyrannies of modern times. Accordingly, it has brought untold hardships and miseries to its people, especially via the brutal ruffians of the IRGC.
But that’s mainly the unfortunate work of the clerics and their IRGC allies ruling inside its borders. When it comes to the outside world, Iran has invaded not a single neighboring country since 1979, and indeed not in the last 300 years before the mullahs.
At the same time, Iran was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein with U.S. and European arms during the 1980s; it has been brutally sanctioned by Washington trade embargoes and economic warfare for the past 30 years; and for decades, it has also been relentlessly assaulted via Israeli assassination squads, saboteurs, and periodic missiles and bombs. In fact, the whole "leading state sponsor of terror" slogan has more validity as a Bibi Netanyahu campaign theme than it does as an accurate description of the real world.
And, no, the "whadabout the proxies" canard doesn’t cut it, either. Not a single one of Iran’s so-called "proxies" in the region was concocted out of whole cloth by the mullahs as some kind of mercenary force recruited, trained, and financed by Tehran and artificially implanted in the soil of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza.
To the contrary, the first three of these represented Shiite populations, which aligned with their Shiite brethren in Iran out of confessional ties and due to the fact that they were imperiled in their home countries. After all, there was no Hezbollah until Israel invaded southern Lebanon in the early 1980s and imposed a harsh occupation that left tens of thousands dead, culminating in the genocidal atrocities at Sabra and Shatila.
Likewise, the late Assad government in Syria was Alawite, which is a Shiite branch, and had been at war with Israel off and on since 1967 under Bashar Assad and his father before him. Whatever the merits of its half-century-long struggle with the Israelis, the Assad regime didn’t need any new marching orders from Tehran to become a "proxy."
Even in the case of Yemen, the country has been divided and wracked by civil war conditions since the 1960s as regionally based Shiite and Sunni factions battled for power. The Houthis, domiciled in the north and west of Yemen, of course, are Shiite and made an alliance with Tehran. Not surprisingly, the southern and eastern Sunni areas of the country were aligned with the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which has waged war against the Houthis much of the time since 2015.
Finally, however evil the Hamas forces are, they were not born, bred, and raised by the mullahs. If anything, the Israeli-sponsored open-air prison in Gaza and five brutal episodes of "mowing the lawn" via vicious bombing campaigns since 2007 were more than enough to explain the rise of Hamas. In fact, Hamas was mainly Sunni, not Shiite, and was aligned with Iran only out of having a common enemy. Even then, most of the suitcases full of cash that Netanyahu permitted to come into Gaza year after year before October 7th were Sunni money from the Gulf states, not Iranian proxy finance.
So, yes, there has been a goodly amount of conflict and violence in the region, but it was not robotically commanded by the Ayatollahs. It was deeply rooted in the indigenous conflicts of the region that long pre-dated the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The common thread, of course, is that all four of these forces were indigenous to the region and had a beef with Israel, separate and apart from anything happening in Tehran. That’s mainly because each of these groups was directly attacked or demonized by Bibi Netanyahu for deep reasons of Israeli politics.
For instance, the only reason Hamas thrived as long as it did is that Bibi Netanyahu financed it via Qatar in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. In turn, that cynical ploy was aimed at scuttling any eventual implementation of the Oslo Accords and a two-state solution on the grounds that the Palestinians were so divided and violent that there was "no one to negotiate with."
In any event, the gist of the 47-Year War on America Lie stems almost entirely from Israel’s ongoing battle with the four mislabeled "proxies" and Washington’s repeated interventions, funding, and international political and diplomatic support for Israel. And even then, taking sides in this manner had no benefit whatsoever for the homeland security of America.
Yet it was the unnecessary and avoidable fallout from consistently taking sides with Israel against these regional foes that gave rise to the hoary myth that Iran has murdered more than 1,000 Americans over the 47 years since the Revolution. Yet a simple fact check conducted by Grok 4 at our request debunks this endlessly chanted claim lock, stock, and barrel.
Here are the key realities: Not one of the 1,050 American deaths during this period occurred on American soil. Exactly 1,041 of these deaths occurred at the hands of alleged Iranian proxies versus only 9 attributable to the Iranian military or other government agencies. Fully 1,000 or 96% of the American deaths happened in the context of U.S. military deployments to the region and the resulting active wars and peacekeeping activities in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and adjacent territories and coastal waters.
That’s right. Not one of these U.S. military deployments from the Beirut Marine barracks forward was necessary for America’s homeland security. To the contrary, all were elective wars undertaken in pursuit of the imperatives of Empire. Accordingly, the resulting deaths are due to putting American military and civilian personnel wrongfully in harm’s way - and most especially from taking sides in local and regional military conflicts that were none of Washington’s business.
In short, the 1,000 American deaths chant is completely and hideously wrong because these figures resulted from Washington-initiated military actions in the Mideast that were wholly unjustified and, consequently, put American lives in harm’s way against local people who had reason to defend themselves from actual or potential U.S. military assault.
Thus, while all of these deaths were tragic and unnecessary, the neocon exploitation and lies about them need to be subject to withering ridicule. That is to say, things that didn’t need to happen owing to Washington’s fault over nearly a half-century do not remotely amount to a casus belli in any rational world.
Indeed, even if you consider these unfortunate deaths as abstract statistics without context or blame, there is absolutely no cause to start a quasi-world war in the Persian Gulf, which supplies a crucial share of the world’s crude oil, refined petroleum, LPGs, liquefied natural gas, industrial sulfur, and helium crucial to semiconductor chip production, among others.
To the contrary, the unhinged madman domiciled in the all-powerful Oval Office has the region, the U.S., and the global economy on the edge of catastrophic upheaval based on an utterly untruthful narrative about 1,050 American deaths during the last 47 years that were far exceeded by the ordinary course accidents and hazards of daily life in America during that same period, such as fatalities from:
o Powered lawnmower accidents: 3,200 deaths.
o Bee stings: 3,900 deaths.
o Falling out of bed: 10,300 deaths.
o Visiting Mexico: 4,000 Americans murdered there.
o Lightning strikes: 2,000 deaths.
o Cardiac arrest during sex: 8,000 deaths."
