We create our own reality. posted by Richard Seymour

(And this is what it looks like). The neoconservative boast gains yet more corroboration from the response to the IAEA's report [PDF] on Iran's nuclear energy programme. The report says Iran cooperated with inspectors, and has enriched uranium to about 4%, which is well below the 90% required to achieve weapons-grade material. Now, the Fars news agency reports that the US has been pressuring the IAEA to alter the report, which is not only probable but close to certainty. However, it transpires that this is unnecessary. The US has simply re-imagined the report to conform with its existing policy:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Tehran was guilty of "selective cooperation."

"This report sadly makes clear that Iran seems uninterested in working with the rest of the world," she said.

"The United States will work with our partners on the UN Security Council and Germany as we move towards a third set of Security Council sanctions," Perino said.

The report is partially about compliance with provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and partially about compliance with UN resolutions. It is not a secret - though it doesn't do to mention - that the US has openly spurned the former, while Iran's development of nuclear energy falls within its rights under the NPT, and that the US routinely ignores UN resolutions and uses its veto to block Security Council resolutions it doesn't like, (such is the imperial structure of the United Nations, lest we forget). However, imperial epistemology being what it is, you don't really know that. That's something you opinionate about, or give off in boilerplate rhetorical spasms about, if you happen to be a recalcitrant ideologue. True knowledge is attained through a sort of tantric abstraction, in which the vivid reality of Islamofascist nuclear destruction bearing down on the free world is imparted. Every New York Times columnist and wire service reporter meditates yogically on White House press releases until the vision of a radically Mahdically sporadically fervid Iranian president discharging eschatologically-guided missiles into American buildings is irreversibly instilled into the old intelligence simulation unit. So, as Iranian airspace is routinely violated, sanctions are prepared for non-threatening and otherwise permitted conduct, and a casus belli is prepared by the, er, robust interrogation of Iraqi prisoners, the next reality that every neoconservative dreams of moves closer. Whether the next President sparkles or scowls, Tehran will burn.

Labels: iaea, iran, nuclear energy, US imperialism