Iran's leader warns that the US is not invulnerable

Taking up the tone of most of the corporate media's coverage of the US' aggression against Iran, a simple statement by Iran's supreme leader is presented as a threat to the US:

Iran's leader: War would be detrimental to U.S. - CNN.com: "Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- The supreme leader of Iran issued a blunt warning Friday that war would be detrimental to the United States.
"You see every now and then in this way they say that all options are on the table. That means even the option of war," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "This is how they make these threats against us.
"Well, these kinds of threats are detrimental to the U.S.," he said. "The war itself will be 10 times as detrimental to the U.S.""

As usual, the West is presented as rational and peace-loving, while the ayatollah comes across as a flaming lunatic. One would never guess that it's the US and its vassal state, Israel, that is the aggressor and source of provocations to which Iran is responding.

From the deadly explosions at Iranian military sites to the murder of its nuclear scientists, all the way to the aircraft carrier battle groups dispatched to the Persian Gulf and an economic boycott (which under international law is an act of war), the Iranians are clearly on the receiving end of hostilities directed at it by the US and its minions.

That the Iranians have the temerity to stand up to this and declare their willingness to inflict reciprocal pain against their attackers isn't lunacy or provocative. Most people would say it's coldly rational and realistic.

You hurt me, I'll hurt you.

We don't expect the news media to tell the truth any more. In the recent dust-up with the New York Times' public editor, that poor punching bag of a lackey asked somewhat sheepishly, what do you expect, for the media to be "vigilantes of truth"?

Such notions, like the Geneva Conventions under GW Bush, are simple naive and quaint. Times have changed, and the old rules no longer apply.

Might makes right, and not only do the winners get to write history, but nowadays they also get to write the news media's dispatches from the front lines.

When the war finally commences for real, the people fighting won't even know what they're fighting for. All they'll have to cling to is a slick story manufactured on Madison Avenue that could just as easily be selling soap -- or the next president of the United States.