By Anthony Hall



Whatsupic -- Dr. Hall, Professor of Globalization Studies, University of Lethbridge, Canada, promotes the radical idea that the process of Globalization should be one that respects national and international laws, the rights of First Nations, and democratic self-determination. In short, the opposite to our current system of globalized poverty and war in the service of corporate monopoly predation and supranational totalitarianism.

In the following excerpt from a longer piece, he decries the current Western strategies -- instrumentalized by psychological operations (psy ops) campaigns that create unreasonable fear and hate – that are setting the stage for on-going economic, and possibly kinetic, warfare against Iran.

Mark Taliano

Part 1

The state of formal relations between the governments of Canada and the Islamic Republic of Iran are abysmal. Just days ago Stephen Harper implicitly urged on an internal uprising within Iran. In a speech in Vancouver he ushered in Nowruz, the Persian New Year, by conveying the view that Iran’s current government rules through “tyranny and oppression.”

In September of 2012 the Harper government unilaterally terminated Canada’s embassy in Tehran while simultaneously expelling Iranian diplomats from Ottawa. “Canada views the Government of Iran as the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today,” declared Harper’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

In my view the Harper government’s characterization of both the domestic condition and the international orientation of Iran is grossly inaccurate. Our own foreign policy towards Iran is ill considered and inconsistent with Canada’s genuine national interests, but especially our economic, cultural and geopolitical interests.

The heartland of the ancient civilization of Persia, Iran is a resource-rich country at the cross-roads of Eurasia. Poised between the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea in the north, Iran is home to a diverse population of almost 80,000,000 people. Last autumn I was invited to Iran’s capital, Tehran, as a delegate to a New Horizon International Conference of Independent Thinkers and Film Makers.

In Tehran I enjoyed stimulating, wide ranging and free flowing intellectual discourse with a distinguished group of colleagues primarily from throughout Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The host of the conference, Nader Talebzadeh, is a renowned journalist and filmmaker who regularly hosts on TV one of Iran’s most popular public affairs shows.

I was invited to appear on Mr. Talebzadeh’s show that included simultaneous translation into Farsi, Persia’s main language. The proceedings of the New Horizon conference were intensively and extensively covered by the Iranian news media. One of my assignments was to interpret recent developments in Canada for Iranian audiences.

Since my visit to Iran the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, created a significant political and constitutional crisis in the United States by addressing Congress without the approval of the US President Barak Obama. Netanyahu’s aim was to cut off the possibility of a deal on Iran’s nuclear energy program between the governments of Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

These negotiations are tied to what I would describe as an elaborate scheme of economic warfare designed to hurt the people and government of Iran. The preferred scenario here is obvious. This economic pain is being inflicted to intervene in the internal sovereignty of the Iranian.

As Stephen Harper’s recent Nowruz speech in Vancouver helps clarify, the preferred agenda here is that the foreign imposition of so-called sanctions will help induce a significant portion of the Iranian people to rise up against their own system of government. Under the existing conditions in the region this tactic of regime change is reprehensible. Unlike Canada’s ally and arms customer Saudi Arabia, Iran is the site of frequent elections that do result in significant alterations in the public policies of the Iranian government.

As long as the Canadian government continues as a protagonist in this economic warfare, many Canadian enterprises that are anxious to conduct business with their Iranian counterparts will continue to be hampered. Government interventions in the imperatives of free trade will continue to deprive Canadian companies of a secure legal framework to interact commercially with a relatively stable, resource rich and technologically sophisticated country, one whose well educated population includes a very high proportion of university-educated women.

There is little doubt that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is following a line in his conduct of Canadian foreign policy that is consistent with that of his neoconservative colleagues and mentors in the US Republican Party. Indeed, since Stephen Harper delivered his notorious speech to the Israeli Knesset in early 2014 the government of Canada has outdone the government of the United States in subordinating its national interest to the political agenda of Likudnik-dominated Israel.

In this thread you will read "David Frum, George Bush, Alberta Report and the Axis of Evil Speech"

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the Whatsupic.