'MADMEN' OF NORTH KOREA AND IRAN

It is a truism that victors write the history. Less acknowledged is that history once written even if false (also more usual than acknowledged) continues through the ages as propaganda. So it is with the Western portrayal of two members of Bush II's infamous 'axis-of-evil' – North Korea and Iran.

North Korea earned international ire with its recent nuclear test, and Iran has been the victim of hysterical propaganda by America and Israel, its two principal foes for several years now. Forgotten are the facts. For example, that North Korea was flattened by American bombing in the Korean civil war in which both North and South plotted attacks on each other with the former beating the latter to the punch. Not satisfied with merely flattening the North's cities and killing millions, the US went on to destroy the North's dams, flooding its rice paddies. Inspite of such crimes, it is North Korea that is regarded as the 'evil' nation. Such is the power of propaganda and the loathsome complicity of the North American media, who did not become evil just after 911 or before the invasion of Iraq.

As Eric Margolis has argued in 'American Raj', however, the North Korean leader may be much saner than imagined. His nuclear capability has been a successful deterrent against the American forces camped at the 38th parallel since the 1950s, although recently they have moved out of artillery range, alarming the North Koreans. So it is with Iran, which was invaded 4 times in the 20th century, and subjected to a proxy colonialism by the US with its puppet 'democrat' the Shah who between 1953 and his ouster in 1979 tortured, imprisoned and killed thousands of Iranians while keeping the Americans ecstatic by selling them Iranian oil for a song, and buying American weapons with the petty cash so earned. That is why Iranians had to be punished when they threw out American 'democracy' in 1979 and took 50 hostages. That is why Reagan/Rumsfeld and Thatcher had to supply the other great 'democrat' in the region, Saddam Hussein, with weapons so he could kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians in an 8-year war.

Iran must love punishment. It eschews dollars for euros, increasing pressure for ending the dollar's status as a reserve currency (pretty much toast anyway with the financial 'crimes' of the market fundamentalists who have manufactured the present economic crisis), and supports resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq (Hamas and Hezbollah). It does so in the face of incomparable military superiority in just about every way of the Israelis (not just with their 200 nukes) - let alone the American colossus.

Another way of looking at this is that Iran is taking a principled stand against American and Israeli crimes of occupation. Iran is being encircled by these two powers and getting a few nukes may be the best deterrent for Iran, as Margolis persuasively argues.

As an American madman visits Toronto to give another speech full of lies, it is worth remembering that truth and victory rarely walk hand in hand.