Moscow’s highly effective usage of Iranian drone technology in Ukraine has sparked a fierce backlash from Washington and its NATO allies. However, the criticism of Tehran for supplying drones, and in the future possibly ballistic missiles to Russia, reflects astounding Western hypocrisy.
Calls for everything from a probe into Iranian drone usage in Ukraine to further sanctions on Tehran are now very much within the Western public discourse. Both Russia and Iran have publicly denied that such drone technology is being used, claims that have outraged Kiev and Washington. What is for certain, is that loitering munitions, or suicide drones, are being used effectively on the battlefield by Russia and it is well known that Moscow has no such drone program of its own. Footage of the drones being used have been analyzed by experts, which all conclude they are models from the Iranian drone program.
The United States is now accusing Russia and Iran of violating international law, with its usage of Iranian drones, citing UN security council resolution 2231 — that ratified the Iran nuclear deal as legal — to do so. The US and its NATO allies accuse Moscow of using the suicide drones to target the Ukrainian power grid, as well as civilian targets. Whilst there can be no question that the drones have played a prominent role in destroying roughly a third of the Ukrainian power grid, there is not yet evidence to determine whether civilians have been targeted with Iranian loitering munitions.
Western Hypocrisy Continues…
It is often stated by the US Government and military, that the war in Ukraine is key to the survival of what they call the “rules based international order”, or “new world order” that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whilst the claims of the US being the leader of the “free” and “civilized” world have been vastly examined in the past, the need to address newer allegations, in the wake of Iranian drone usage in Ukraine, has now arisen.
The most outrageous approach that we have recently seen from the West, are active claims that Iran should be sanctioned for its transfer of loitering munitions to Moscow. The lunacy of this argument does not stem from the line of thinking that the very act of Iran providing the technology to Russia is punishable by way of economic sanctions, but rather that the 2015 nuclear deal — signed between Iran and the US — is currently being invoked as the legal reason for such sanctions. Not only does the 2015 Iran nuclear deal provide Iran with the ability to take counter measures to the US, if certain provisions are not respected, but the nuclear deal itself has been dead since May of 2018. It was the United States of America which unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal, only to impose the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign that was criticized by the International Court of Justice as being illegal.
US President Joe Biden, during his 2020 leadership campaign, pledged to revive the deal, yet has only further sanctioned the Islamic Republic of Iran and failed to come to any compromise, at the expense of Washington’s NATO allies. To claim that Tehran is violating a deal that the US tore up, for no justifiable material reason, is the height of hypocrisy and yet again proves consistent with the US’ one rule for thee but not for me approach. Out of every argument that could be deployed against Iran for providing drone technology to Russia, this line of reasoning is perhaps the most absurd and unfortunately seems to have been deployed to strengthen the Biden administration’s reasoning behind its failure to pull through on the President’s campaign pledge.
Then we have the condemnation of Tehran for aiding Russia’s war effort, which Western media frequently claim equates to Iran contributing to acts that are tantamount to terrorism, against the Ukrainian civilian population. This again could not bleed any more irony, as the West has consistently supplied Ukraine with tens of billions in military support that has been used by Ukraine, which has been accused by leading Human Rights organizations of murdering civilians. Pending an authoritative investigation into the events of the war in Ukraine, it is difficult to determine what weapons have been used to commit which crimes and by what side, but it is certain that NATO has trained and equipped the Ukrainian armed forces that are committing attacks that kill civilians. There are also many questions about the extent to which NATO and its allies have trained, armed and cultivated fascist entities that have come to dominate the Ukrainian forces.
With the US Government actively aiding anti-Iranian terrorist groups, like the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK/MKO), along with working to incite civil unrest inside Iran for decades, claims of Iranian interference in foreign affairs are weak arguments coming from the US. As the US continues its own illegal occupation of a third of Syrian territory, its sale and transfer of weapons to rogue regimes like Israel and Saudi Arabia, in addition to its historic backing of al-Qaeda linked organizations throughout the Middle East, Washington does not possess the moral authority to point the finger at Iran. This is important to point out, not in order to make a ‘whataboutist’ argument in defense of Tehran, but to provide an argument as to why the Western corporate media’s reporting on the issue and demonization of Iran is disingenuous.
Throughout the course of the war in Ukraine, NATO State-aligned media has uncritically interviewed Western military generals and politicians with an approach that can only be labelled critical when the journalists or news anchors themselves are more pro-Ukrainian and pro-war that their government and military figures themselves. There is constant talk about Russian and Iranian “disinformation”, “propaganda” and “fake news”, yet both Russian and Iranian media are banned across the Western world, most severely censored in Europe, and there are never any efforts to present even slightly balanced reporting on any issue concerning Tehran or Moscow. Politicians and military officials are meant to have their opinions and statements questioned by the media, yet when these supposed journalists take the unquestioning side of the very political figures they are meant to hold to account, it is clear that they are pushing a form of propaganda.
The problem is not with propaganda per se, but instead, that Western corporate media spends most of its time pretending that it is not propaganda, and this disingenuous approach is what robs it of any authenticity. Looking at propaganda can tell us a lot about what either side in a conflict is providing as its methodology, ideology, and/or justifications for action against its enemy, therefore, propaganda is useful to the critical observer. Yet the reporting of Western media does not provide such value in most cases. Western media has innovated the journalistic landscape, merging propaganda with fictitious multimedia performance, churning out narratives that fall inside a type of middle-ground between the narratives of any two-sides and instead inventing a synthetic storyline that will pull from half-truths in order to make one side a hero and the other a villain. In this parallel universe that they create, they have invented what I call the “Western filter”, which is to say that instead of telling you the real reason behind the side they wish for you to take, they manage to invent a PG version of reality that makes the narrative of one side easier to accept. The problem is, that this a fictional story, not news, and should not be taken seriously for mass consumption.
