[Peace-discuss] Iran in the crosshairs

[Brussel Morton K.]

Interesting and sober speculation about U.S. moves for an eventual  
attack on Iran.--mkb

Obama’s War Signals
Iran in the crosshairs

by Justin Raimondo, July 17, 2009
Only Richard Nixon, whose political career was launched and sustained  
by an ostensibly militant anti-communism, could have traveled to  
China, and – with conservative support — effected a de facto strategic  
alliance with a country long considered an implacable enemy. This  
Nixon-to-China meme is regularly invoked as aphoristic evidence that  
we must expect the unexpected, and it comes to mind when considering  
the prospects of an impending military conflict with Iran: it occurs  
to me that only Barack Obama, who won the White House in large part  
due to hisopposition to the Iraq war, could take us to war with Iran,  
and rally liberals and much of the left behind it.

Oh, I can hear the outraged howls of protest from the Obama cult, but  
consider:

The president has already set a September deadline for Iran to respond  
to our as-yet-informal proposal to negotiate over the completely phony  
nuclear issue – an oddly confrontational approach to opening the first  
on-the-record high level talks with the Islamic Republic since the  
Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

The nuke issue is phony because our own intelligence community,  
speaking through the CIA, determined "with high confidence" the  
Iranians gave up their nuclear weapons program in 2003. Yet Obama has  
repeatedly said Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons. The great  
sigh of relief we all breathed when the CIA assessment was made public  
last year – effectively blocking any last-minute attempt by the  
Bushies to strike Iran in the waning days  of Dubya’s reign – gives  
way to new anxieties.

The evidence that Obama is ramping up the US effort to encircle and  
eventually strike at Iran is building: added deployments to  
Afghanistan and our increasing intervention in Pakistan can always be  
attributed to the vagaries of the Af-pak front, but one can’t blame  
the Iranians from looking at it differently. The US military presence,  
to the south and the east, is looming larger. This, in tandem with an  
apparent hardening of the US stance – e.g.  the "muscularity" of  
Hillary Clinton’s most  recent peroration – can only be seen by Tehran  
as prefiguring war.

The spin prior to delivering her speech to the Council on Foreign  
Relations was that this was going to be a "muscular" speech, and  
indeed it was: threatening to use the military to "defend our  
interests, our allies, and our people" when it comes to Iran’s alleged  
nuclear weapons program, she declared, with typical Clintonian  
glibness: "this is not an option we seek nor is it a threat; it is a  
promise."

With those words, the first rhetorical shots of the third Middle  
Eastern war – and potentially the most devastating, both to the region  
and our national interests – have been fired. The phraseology is  
almost Bushian in its studied belligerence, and it is most certainly  
not a précis to a rapprochement with Tehran.

This is just about what any observer of the scene would have expected  
from our Secretary of State, given her past statements – the most  
recent being her threat to launch a "first strike" (her words) on Iran  
– and her ongoing refusal to retract her enthusiasm for the Iraq war.  
Indeed, in her comments to George Stephanopoulos on "This Week," she  
held up the invasion of Iraq as a model for how to deal with the  
Iranians.

As I pointed out on the occasion of her appointment, the State  
Department is going to serve as the War Party’s operational command  
post in this administration, and Hillary’s war cry delivered in the  
form of a speech is the signal that the push for war has begun. The  
CFR speech was widely touted as auguring Hillary’s great comeback,  
after taking a nasty fall, and her rising prominence and visibility  
puts an all-too-familiar face on American foreign policy, one that  
hasn’t changed in any but a cosmetic sense, at least as far as Iran is  
concerned.

Obama, consumed with the rapidly deteriorating US economy, will let  
Hillary define the terrain on which the conflict with Iran will  
unfold: the stage is being set. The actors take their places, and,  
amid frantic preparations taking place behind the curtains, hardly  
suspected by the audience, the drama takes its preordained course.

This will consist of three acts: the first, "negotiations," is bound  
to be the longest, and least interesting, as the US issues the usual  
ultimatums, accompanied by threats of economic and diplomatic  
sanctions. This is ostensibly meant to cow the Iranians into giving up  
their perfectly legal nuclear power program, which the IAEA says shows  
no signs of morphing into an effort to create a nuclear weapon – but  
Act One has little to do with Tehran. The real point is to convince  
the audience (that’s you, the international community and the American  
people) we tried talking before we started bombing.

Act Two will take us to the UN, where the "debate" will begin. At this  
point, that bothersome National Intelligence Estimate [.pdf] – you  
know, the one that said Iran has no nukes, and isn’t on the verge of  
acquiring them, either – is bound to be "revised," in light of new  
"intelligence." "The clock is ticking" on Iran, says Obama, and, like  
his predecessor, he’ll no doubt find the "facts" to fit a course of  
action that is preordained in the script.

To draw out the simile to what is perhaps the stretching point, what  
we ought to be asking at this point is: who are the scriptwriters?

Who wants war with Iran? Who has been demanding it, hoping for it, and  
doing their best to provoke it? What faction of the foreign policy  
"community" has been warning that Iran is months away from creating a  
nuclear weapon, and will certainly target a small "democratic" US ally  
in the region, one which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  
purportedly (but not really) threatened to "wipe off the map"?

It’s no secret the Israel lobby has been in the forefront of the  
effort to mobilize American political, diplomatic and military muscle  
for a dust-up with Iran: the alleged "threat" emanating from Iran was  
the theme of the last AIPAC conference, and the propaganda machine  
that does Tel Aviv’s bidding has been going full-bore since the Iraq  
war ended in "mission accomplished," targeting Tehran as the next  
victim of our post-9/11 madness. The current power struggle within the  
Iranian leadership, that culminated in the election fraud protests and  
the hard-liner clampdown, set the confrontational tone for the pro  
forma "negotiations" that will segue seamlessly into the second act,  
and, finally, the third – which will be played out here in this  
country, on the op ed pages of the nation’s newspapers (what’s left of  
them, anyway), and around dinner tables all across America.

Act Three will feature the debate here at home, but it will not take  
place in a vacuum: having carefully laid the basis for military action  
by establishing 1) Iranian intransigence, and 2) the veracity of US  
"intelligence" regarding Iran’s nuclear program, all the conditions  
for a launching an attack will have been met, but for one – the  
consent of the American people.

Of course, they’d never let us vote on it. Unfortunately, the Ludlow  
Amendment never passed, and since that time we’ve become so habituated  
to being hectored and bullied into war by all-knowing elites that no  
one has seriously proposed anything like it.

Yet the War Party can’t just go barging into a major military conflict  
without at least the passive acceptance of those who will be paying  
for it, as well as fighting and dying for it. Once we’re in, no matter  
how slender the pretext, the argument can be made that we can’t  
retreat without a major loss of face, and the "waste" of lives that  
have already been lost – essentially the same argument that sustained  
the Iraq war long after the futility and dishonesty of the effort had  
been widely acknowledged. The trick is getting in.

They say Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapons capability represents  
an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. This may indeed be true,  
and yet that threat is no more substantial than the threat to the US  
represented by Soviet nukes during the cold war era. In that historic  
facedown, each side was constrained by the certainty of mutual assured  
destruction if war should break out. Since Israel, as everyone knows,  
possessesa large nuclear arsenal, the Iranians would be similarly  
constrained not to use theirs. The great problem in the Middle East  
today is that Israel is not so constrained, at the moment: the  
Israelis enjoy a nuclear monopoly in the region, and they are  
determined to maintain it – yes, even if it means war.

Not a war between Israel and Iran, of course, but between the US and  
Iran. Israel is sending all kinds of signals that if we don’t start  
the bombing, they will, but the Israelis have neither the technical  
means nor the inclination to risk their own necks – and why should  
they bother, when they have us to do their dirty work for them?

The way to achieve a regional settlement of the nuclear issue ought to  
be clear enough: direct negotiations between Tel Aviv and Tehran and a  
mutual disarmament pact. Syria long ago proposed that the Middle East  
be declared a nuclear-free zone, a suggestion steadfastly ignored by  
Washington, and barely reported in the Western media. The Israelis,  
for their part, won’t even acknowledge having a substantial nuclear  
arsenal, and refuse to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, while  
Iran, a signatory, has opened its nuclear facilities to inspection.

This kind of even-handed common sense approach to peacefully resolving  
regional tensions is strictly forbidden in elite foreign policy  
circles, however, no matter which party is in power – for that would  
put the Israelis on the same level as everyone else in the Middle  
East, which Tel Aviv (especially the current regime) regards as an  
insult. There is one standard for Israel, and another for the rest of  
the inhabitants of the region – and anything less (or more) than that  
is evidence of "anti-Semitism."

Make no mistake: the enormous power of the Israel lobby – and it is  
formidable, don’t let anyone kid you – is being utilized to bring us  
to the brink, and we are moving along at a fairly rapid pace. It won’t  
be long before the clock stops ticking, and the fireworks begin: oh,  
to be sure, there will be plenty of drama, and secondary plots, along  
the way, but the essential narrative – Mad mullahs plan on blowing up  
Israel, if not the world – has already been written, rehearsed, and  
audience-tested.

It remains to be seen, however, if this particular show ever gets out  
of summer stock. The American people are in no mood for another war –  
certainly not a war of the scope necessitated by a huge and populous  
nation such as Iran. It will take a sustained political and propaganda  
campaign by the War Party to pull this one off – and yet you shouldn’t  
doubt they have the resources and the will to do it.

You thought you were safe, now that George W. Bush is out of the White  
House, and the neoconservatives have gone back to their well- 
subsidized holes – but you were wrong. I would not be at all surprised  
if the Iranian "crisis" – and it will be declared a "crisis," complete  
with ticking clocks and lines in the sand, of that you can be sure –  
required a "delay" in our plans to withdraw from Iraq. At that point,  
the American people will either rise up and put an end to the nonsense  
– or else they’ll acquiesce, without much protest, to what seems like  
the inevitable.
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