What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

"I am not suggesting" inciting war with Iran, Broder insists. He's just saying it will bring the country together, fix the economy and make Obama one of the greatest presidents of all time.

I think the logic here is that the Iranian government or some group associated with them took this guy out.   I mean, it's a sign of desperation to start killing your own nuclear scientists.

So who is Harman, that we should trust her sense of what the "logic" behind Middle East violence is? A military hawk, she was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee until 2006; when Democrats retook the House, she was not named as the new Intelligence chair, in part because  Time magazine (10/20/06) had reported that Harman in 2005 had promised an Israeli agent that she would try to help pro-Israel lobbyists who had been accused of espionage; in return, the lobbyists' organization, AIPAC, would push Nancy Pelosi, then expected to become House speaker, to make Harman Intelligence chair.

Congressional Quarterly (4/19/09) later advanced the story by reporting that Harman's promise had been recorded by a Bush administration wiretap, and that the reason Harman was not prosecuted for what would seem to be illegal influence-peddling was that Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, wanted to use Harman to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the story that revealed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.  And Harman did, indeed, call the Times to try to get them to kill the piece (Who Runs Gov, 4/21/09).

What was it exactly about this background that suggested to MSNBC that Harman would be a trustworthy source on the question of which player in the Middle East, with Israel among the suspects, might have killed Mohammadi?  And what led NBC Nightly News (1/12/10) to take that quote from Harman's interview and use it as the last word in its January 12 report on the assassination? The answers to those questions may be as hard to discover as the identity of Mohammadi's killers.

Few would question the media machine's efficiency. Once a major media outlet decides to run with a story--as was done with the Iranian election protests--there is little to arrest its circulation or to challenge the implications the particular telling makes.

Of the Iranians and non-Iranians supporting the protests--and they are numerous in Canada alone--an important distinction can be made between those reacting to the events and those reacting to the story of the events. I suspect those belonging to the former must possess a perpetual feeling of dissatisfaction with the media’s porous and flimsy representation of Iranian politics, as if social reality can always be tucked away in neat little binaries: tradition and modernity, religious and secular, legitimate and illegitimate.

Al Attar goes on to contrast Amira Haas' maxim that "the role of the media is to monitor the centers of power" with the appropriate term for such "stories that contain little substance, an obvious slant and are devoid of any critical analysis: propaganda." In al Attar's view, "cheerleading a particular position--there is a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, Hugo Chávez is a bad man, the solution to the economic crisis is to throw more money at the financiers who got us into the mess--is the role of a propaganda machine."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).