Robert Fisk: Iran has been changed forever by admitting its great mistake - yet the west ignores its own deceits
No longer can its religious leaders claim
papal infallibility. If they can lie about killing innocents on a Ukrainian
airliner – most of them Iranian — then surely their jurisprudence might prove
equally flawed
“In wartime,” Churchill famously told Stalin, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” He said this on 30 November 1943 – by chance his 69th birthday – in an effort to impress upon the Soviet leader the importance of deception in the planning of D-Day. In fact, the Allies did deceive the Germans, whose Wehrmacht commanders thought the landings would be made in northern France rather than on the beaches of Normandy.
But the meaning of
truth and lies – even the very word “wartime” – have so changed their
meaning and usefulness in recent Middle East history
that it’s almost impossible to apply Churchill’s quotation today. After its
anti-aircraft missile destroyed Ukrainian Airways flight 752 this month, Iran’s initial lie – that
its loss was due to engine problems – was uttered not to “attend” the truth but
to protect the Iranian regime from being blamed in case its people discovered
the truth. Which, of course, they
quickly did.
There was a time when
you could get away with this sort of giant fib. In a pre-technology age, almost
any catastrophe could be glossed – we still talk about a disaster “shrouded in
mystery” – but phone cameras, missile-tracking, long-range radar and
satellites quickly expose a lie. The loss of Malaysian
Airlines flight MH370 almost six years ago is the only exception I can
think of.... read more:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iran-plane-crash-shot-down-ukraine-us-trump-boris-johnson-a9286566.html
