ISLAMABAD, Dec 6: Washington’s threats of war on Iran betray the United States’ doctrine of ‘What We Say Goes’, the anti-establishment American broadcaster David Barsamian said here on Thursday.

“America makes the rules and demands the world to obey,” he said in a lecture at the Quaid-i-Azam University on “Will Iran be Next”. To prove the point he contrasted US National Intelligence Estimate report that Iran was not making nuclear weapons and President George Bush’s response that Iran “was, is and will be a serious threat” until it came out “clean”.

Originally the Bush administration had planned to go on to Iran after sorting out Iraq “in two weeks”. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan went awry and so the administration has stationed a formidable armada off the Iran coast to frighten it into submission, he argued.

What people of South Asia were suffering today also was nothing new but the old imperialism and hegemonism of the US, he said, informing the audience of university students and professors that the US had a history of invading countries every 30 months on the average.

It could do so because the corporate-run US media had dulled the public conscience at home by hiding or ignoring the truth and dishing out the propaganda by the administration that demonised other nations as rogue states and dangerous to US interests and security, he said.

Barsamian said the Americans had no sense of history and described the USA as the United States of Amnesia and the US media its Weapons of Mass Distraction. Asked why Iran is the next target when the neocons paint Pakistan as the more present danger, he said “perhaps because they are more interested in controlling Iran’s strategic (oil) resources”.

A little later however he added, “I will not be surprised if the US has operational plans to occupy Pakistan” - a country with nuclear weapons and already “softened” and within easy reach of the US forces assembled for Iran.

Barsamian delivered the lecture as guest of the Eqbal Ahmed Foundation and the magazine Badalti Dunya honouring the Pakistani intellectual who woke up “America’s conscience” against the Vietnam war and fought for justice to the colonised people of Palestine and Algeria in the 1960s.

Inspired by Eqbal Ahmed, his Guru and Ustad, the greying and bespectacled broadcaster started his Alternative Radio in 1986 to tell the American people facts that the corporate-controlled US media do not despite the freedoms available in the US.

It saw a pathetic refugee problem in Darfur but not in the six million Iraqis displaced by the US-led war in their country, half of them internally, he observed.

Even when the US media criticised American administrations it was for their “incompetence” and not for the “immorality” of their acts, he said. He found the Democrats “no different” from the Republicans in committing “war crimes”. “What is very, very dangerous is the racist characterisation and demonising of Muslims and Islam in the US media,” he said.

Barsamian peppered his lecture with Urdu idioms and poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz while praising the current struggle by the elements of civil society in Pakistan against the “military dictatorship” and for democracy.

But he cautioned that the struggle “has to have local stamp to be authentic” and warned that “soon dollars will be flowing into Pakistan”. “This is what democracy looks like,” he said holding a dollar note to the audience to drive his point home.