One of the major factors influencing Iran coverage over the past few years was the need to downplay every hideous thing Tehran did, in order to protect the nuclear deal. The media literally looked the other way while Iran's proxies stacked up civilian corpses.
For that matter, the media and international organizations supportive of the nuke deal (EU, UN) made a point of not noticing that Iran was building a regional network of murderous proxy forces. This gave Iran exactly the kind of deniability it wanted.
Iran's proxy network is, on paper, the antithesis of everything the U.N. and "international community" stand for. It's a deliberate effort to escape accountability, exactly the way gangsters use cutouts so murders can never be traced back to the big bosses.
Gangster tactics like this are the opposite of civilization - in fact they are tools of anti-civilization, designed to destroy civilization by leveraging its virtues and rules against it. Iran gets the respectability of a nation-state without any of the responsibility.
This makes civilization a losing bet. Sign up with the good guys and you get endless rules, hassles about human rights, micromanaging of every military action you take. Sign up with the bad guys and you get to murder anyone who gets in your way.
OPPOSE the bad guys and Iran will set up a heavily armed Shiite militia proxy on your turf, ready to wreak havoc on command from Tehran, while the UN, EU, and U.S. Democrat Party stand utterly silent. Just tell them Shiites are an oppressed minority and they'll stay quiet.
There are people out there right now implying, or even explicitly stating, that Iran was somehow justified in using its proxies to launch a rocket attack that killed an American, among other acts of mayhem, because Trump withdrew from the nuke deal.
This is equivalent to admitting the nuke deal was Obama giving Iran a nearly unlimited license to commit terrorism and develop its illegal proxy military network, along with bundles of cash to assist with that development. And that's EXACTLY what the nuke deal was.
Obama and his people admired Soleimani's achievements and thought Iran's proxy network across the Middle East gave it a checkmate position over its Sunni regional adversaries. They thought they were realigning America to get behind the inevitable winners of a dirty regional war.
And in so doing, Obama gave Iran the time and money to slide a few more pawns, rooks, and bishops around on that chessboard. Until Trump took action, Iran was all but guaranteed to complete its "Shiite crescent." Iran's current fury is born of frustration. They were SO close!
All of this was done right out in the open. None of it was much of a secret. Soleimani traveled the Middle East in flagrant defiance of a UN travel ban. Everyone knew what he was doing, but nobody said a word. The same UN that condemns Israel 30 times a session was utterly inert.
Part of this was the urgent need to combat the ISIS monster Obama unleashed, which led to Iraq legitimizing and supporting Iran's Shiite militias as an "anti-ISIS" military force. This gave Iran direct control over huge parts of Iraq and a tight grip on Baghdad politics.
Besides knowing the Europeans and globalist entities desperately wanted the trade enabled by lifting sanctions from the nuke deal, Iran knows how to manipulate Western media and political prejudices. They're doing it right now with Soleimani's "huge funeral rallies."
Brutal authoritarian regimes with squads of unaccountable proxy killers are GREAT at manipulating the kind of street theater that attracts Western cameras and impresses left-wing politicians. They can easily shove thousands onto the streets for "impressive rallies."
And as we've seen in Iraq, they'll simply murder anyone who rallies against them. Maybe the protesters get a little Western media coverage, but then Soleimani rolls into town and puts snipers on the roofs to blow their heads off. Eventually the cameras turn elsewhere.
You saw this happen with incredible speed last week. The instant Iran ordered its proxies to attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and Trump responded, the REAL Iraqi protesters UTTERLY VANISHED from mainstream media. Suddenly the embassy attackers were the "protesters."
Iran has lines of influence to U.S. media, some of them developed during the Obama years due to the nuke deal, that allowed it to realign press coverage in its favor VERY quickly. Iran has a lobby, and it knows who to call, who to nudge, who to leak to.
And of course Iran knows how the U.S. media and the Democrat Party are politically aligned. It knows the people who defended the nuke deal will never admit they were wrong. They'll keep doubling down no matter what Tehran does, especially in the Orange Man Bad era. /end
