by B. R. GOWANI
President Barack Obama participates in an interview with Jeff Goldberg in the Oval Office, Feb. 27, 2014. PHOTO/White House/Pete Souza)
The March 2, 2014 edition of Bloomberg View carried an interview of President Barack Obama conducted by Jeffrey Goldberg. A glance at Goldberg’s writing will make it clear that he is a pro-Israel warmonger itching for wars. He also knows how to justify an immoral, illegal, and unnecessary war. A few months before the 2003 United States invasion of and war against Iraq, Goldberg justified the coming war on moral ground:
Everyone knows how disastrous that war has proved for the US and the rest of the world.
A year before the war, Goldberg was even able to show, or so he believed, a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda in his article, The Great Terror,” in the New Yorker magazine.
It was a total lie. The official US reports failed to establish any connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
Alexander Cockburn, in Counterpunch article, portrayed Godlberg correctly:
Who’s the hack? I nominate The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg. He’s the new Remington, though without the artistic talent. Back in 1898, William Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war fever between the United States and Spain. He dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to send back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational to draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Remington duly did so.
Interviews are usually published as they were conducted without any comments. Sometimes though there are notes at the beginning of the interviews. But basically they are of clarifying nature. However the Goldberg interview is preceded by an over 1450 words article in which Goldberg vents out his anger and frustration over several issues.
The article reminds of TV magazine interviews where the interviewer will supply a background of the person being interviewed. Usually, it’s a trick to put the reader in a hate or love mood, depending on the bias of the interviewer. Goldberg is doing the same in this interview.
In the article, Goldberg draws reader’s attention that in spite of Obama’s unwillingness to strike Syria (Israel’s neighbor) last year, Obama still believes that he has the capability to apply force for advancing US interests. He then asks Obama “if, in retrospect, he should have provided more help to Syria’s rebels earlier in their struggle.” Obama again provides his reasons for avoiding the US involvement in the Syrian conflict.
Then he brings up Iran, which many in Israel and in this country would want the US to go to war against. Iran is another country with which Obama chose not to show his military prowess; instead he opted for negotiations. Now this is a no-no for hawks like Goldberg. In the article he writes:
“Obama was adamant that he was correct to fight a congressional effort to impose more time-delayed sanctions on Iran just as nuclear negotiations were commencing.”
Goldberg would want to see more economic harm done to Iran through more sanctions, but alas, Obama is “adamant” not to do that. Obama, though not exactly a messenger of peace, has adopted a soft-confrontational approach towards Iran by imposing less sanctions than what many in Congress and the Israel Lobby wanted him to. He articulated his opposition to sanctions:
“Even in the old Westerns or gangster movies, right, everyone puts their gun down just for a second. You sit down, you have a conversation; if the conversation doesn’t go well, you leave the room and everybody knows what’s going to happen and everybody gets ready. But you don’t start shooting in the middle of the room during the course of negotiations.”
In response to Goldberg’s question as to which extremism, Shia or Sunni, he finds more dangerous, Obama said:
“What I’ll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn’t to say that they aren’t a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find abhorrent, but they’re not North Korea.”
The answer was not to Goldberg’s liking:
“This view puts him at odds with Netanyahu’s understanding of Iran. In an interview after he won the premiership, the Israeli leader described the Iranian leadership to me as ‘a messianic apocalyptic cult.'”
First of all, who gives a damn for what Netanyahu thinks. Another thing, Israel gets every year over $3 billion free money from the US at the expense of the US tax payers. Besides, it would be difficult to find any other country, out of the 200 or so countries of the world, who thinks Iranian leadership is “a messianic apocalyptic cult.”
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com