On June 22, a large portion of the France 2, 8 p.m. newscast, hosted by Laurent Delahousse, was devoted to the US attack on Iran.

Note 1. Clearly, this was far from a balanced presentation. Laurent Delahousse's tone, like that of his colleagues, was one of fascination, even admiration, for the US operation. It was as if we were back in 1991, at the time of the first Gulf War, when journalists, safely tucked away in their studios, played at scaring each other by inflating the "Iraqi threat" (the world's fourth-largest army), facing an armada representing at least a 100-to-1 power ratio. It was at this time that the first "military experts" appeared on television, in the guise of retired generals, proud of their sudden celebrity.

Note 2. One of these experts, Air Force General Patrick Dutartre, was Laurent Delahousse's guest. One of the general's first statements was, precisely, to refer to the first Gulf War. It must be said that Laurent Delahousse offered him the opportunity by referring to it as a "historic operation." [Delahousse did not mention the Battle of Marignan or the Normandy landings, but one could sense the comparison burning on his lips.] While it was — in reality — an operation of international terrorism, like the Bay of Pigs landings of April 17-19, 1961, when the United States, using Cuban mercenaries, attempted, through violence, to overthrow Fidel Castro's government.

Note 3. Laurent Delahousse says: "It was an American operation, but nothing could have been done without the prior work, ultimately, of the Israelis on the ground." In this context, the term "work" has an eminently positive connotation. Delahousse speaks of it as a peaceful operation, a large-scale civil engineering project, like that of the Millau Viaduct, where Delahousse is said to have said: "This grandiose work of art could not have been completed without the prior work of geographers and geologists who identified the best route over the Tarn and surveyed the ground where the bridge piers would be installed." For Delahousse, building a road infrastructure or crushing a rebel country are the same thing...

Note 4. The general even uses these astonishing words: "The Israelis had done an enormous amount of work to suppress, if you will, the threats [...]." But, despite these precautions, the Americans had done everything, just in case, to destroy these systems [i.e.: anti-aircraft] and they were very, very rarely attacked [sic!]. What an inversion! Here is a hyper-power, perhaps with a power ratio of 10,000 to 1 to that of a country that has done nothing to it, that represents no threat to it, which attacks it without warning, and would it be this predatory hyper-power, which would be the victim, which would be the attacked? Doesn't this recall Colin Powell's bottle, brandished at the United Nations podium in 2003, a bottle supposed to contain samples of deadly Iraqi products, and nevertheless filled... with fairy dust?

Note 5. General Dutartre, speaking of Iranian air defences, said: "Can you imagine for a second that an aircraft of this type [the B2] would be shot down, hit, or damaged over Iranian territory?" General Dutartre clearly has in mind images that traumatised Western air force pilots: those of American pilots shot down in North Vietnam and paraded, disheveled, heads bowed, guarded by militiamen often smaller than themselves. These images contained a powerful social symbolism, depicting the greatest, the richest, stripped of their pride and humiliated. A bit like in the past, when the knight was unseated by villains, stripped of his armour, and hung from a branch. There was an image there of an inversion of social relations that was truly unbearable for the dominant classes...

Note 5a. I include this remark because the pilot is, symbolically, the successor to the medieval knight. The anti-G suit corresponds to the armour of yesteryear, the helmet with a plexiglass visor to the knight's helm, and the airplane, like the horse of old, allows one to see the battlefield from above, to fight from above —just as, in civilian life, the noble held the upper hand and relegated the villain, the peasant, to the droppings and stench of the lower classes. Furthermore, the use of the airplane, like that of the horse, presupposes — and presupposed — a capital that commoners lacked.

Note 6. There is another symbolic dimension to this war — Iran is presented as a chthonic power (telluric or subterranean). It is said that its leaders (and in particular Ayatollah Khamenei) "hide" (that is, hide in the earth, in a burrow, a cave, a cellar, a troglodyte). Its uranium enrichment plants, at Natanz or Fordo, are presented as deeply buried. But this subterranean location, initially derived from Greek mythology (the Underworld), has, in part, been transported into Christianity (Hell). Even if, theologically, the Christian Hell is nowhere to be found ["Hell exists," said Abbé Mugnier, diarist and memoirist, "but there is no one in it..."], popular belief (or superstition?) instinctively places it below, as opposed to Paradise, imagined in the heavens... What is underground carries with it negative connotations. 

Note 7. What is underground is also equated with what is inland. A landlocked country (thus having no access to the sea) is also seen as having buried its command bodies. An example of this is provided, for example, by the countries of Central Asia, the "Stan" countries: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. Now, it was in such a fantasised Asia that, at the end of the 1940s, the Blake & Mortimer comic strip set its episode "The Secret of the Swordfish." In which we saw Basam Damdu, dictator and head of the Yellow Empire, aspiring to conquer the world — and being thwarted and defeated by (Western) pilots at the controls of the Swordfish, a sort of magical plane, both supersonic and underwater. Now, what is the B2-Spirit bomber, a delta-wing bomber without tail fins, if not, 70 years later, the transformed and revived Swordfish?

Note 8. During the interview, General Dutartre makes a revealing remark: he says that this bombing of Iranian nuclear sites is also an indirect warning to Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Xi Jinping. A way of saying: what we Americans do to the Iranians can also do to you Russians, to you North Koreans, to you Chinese. [In which he is deluding himself]. But this also sheds light, in retrospect, on the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For these bombs were not only (aside from their racist aspect) intended for an already defeated Japan, they were also intended to intimidate Stalin and immobilise him in Europe.

Note 9. At the end, Delahousse talks about Hollywood and evokes, with his interlocutor, the film Top Gun, which features (and highlights) fighter pilots from the American naval air force: with Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran, Laurent Delahousse and General Dutartre experience reality like a film and see their film become reality…

https://www.legrandsoir.info/l-attaque-des-etats-unis-contre-l-iran-selon-le-jt-de-france-2.html

TRANSLATION BY JULES LETAMBOUR....

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.