After losing a war to a mere proxy of Iran in this summer’s defeat to Hizbullah, Israel‘s prime minister is making a laughable attempt to intimidate the country with the world’s largest natural gas reserves and whose allies run Iraq. More surprising than the brutish rhetoric is the fact that he’s still in the job. Can Israel find no one better?
From AFP:

“Visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stepped up rhetoric against Iran, saying the its controversial nuclear program could be prevented through intimidation.

Speaking to reporters following meetings with President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin, Olmert said he had told Putin that “there was no chance of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear arms if Iran is not afraid.“

“The Iranians should be afraid that something they don’t want to happen will occur,” he said.

Olmert went on to say that “I made it clear why in my opinion it is important that the Iranians are afraid,” but he fell short of mentioning what measures that be taken against the Islamic state.

He nevertheless sought a tougher Russian stance against Iran, where Russian engineers are building the country’s first reactor.”

The Weekly Standard had this to say about this summer’s war between Israel and Lebanon:

“The right response is renewed strength–in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions–and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.

But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg–a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision–to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.”

If this war was really “our war, too,” then we had a part in committing numerous war crimes. Human Rights Watch reported, among other things, that both Israel and Hizbullah used cluster bombs in the 2006 war:

“Hezbollah fired cluster munitions into civilian areas in northern Israel during the recent conflict, Human Rights Watch reported today. This is the first time that Hezbollah’s use of these controversial weapons has been confirmed.

Hezbollah’s deployment of the Chinese-made Type-81 122mm rocket is also the first confirmed use of this particular model of cluster munition anywhere in the world. Human Rights Watch documented two Type-81 cluster strikes that took place on July 25 in the Galilee village of Mghar.”

“On July 24, 2006, Human Rights Watch was the first to confirm Israel’s use of cluster munitions in Lebanon, when it broke the news that a July 19 attack on the village of Blida left one civilian dead and 12 wounded. Human Rights Watch tracked the use of cluster munitions throughout the conflict, and successfully urged the United States not to ship new cluster munitions to Israel. Since the end of the fighting, Human Rights Watch has investigated the humanitarian impact of dangerous unexploded submunitions on civilians in southern Lebanon.”

An attack on Iran by America would be a terrifying, utterly contemptible aggression and attempts to recast violations of the UN Charter or the Geneva Conventions as a wise policy of “pre-emption” or “unilateralism” should be brushed aside this time as old authoritarian apologia—well, as George W. Bush’s speech of 9/20/2001 said (perhaps about his own administration):

“And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

Is an attack on Iran some sort of neocon fantasy? Perhaps it is actually quite a real danger, something that could happen if Bush and Cheney are not stopped. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who correctly claimed before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the country had no WMDs, is now sounding the warning that confrontation is at hand, as he says on Democracy Now:

“Well, the most important thing is to understand the reality that Iran is squarely in the crosshairs as a target of the Bush administration, in particular, as a target of the Bush administration as it deals — as it relates to the National Security Strategy of the United States. You see, this isn’t a hypothetical debate among political analysts, foreign policy specialists. Read the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy, where Iran is named sixteen times as the number one threat to the national security of the United States of America, because in the same document, it embraces the notion of pre-emptive wars of aggression as a legitimate means of dealing with such threats. It also recertifies the Bush administration doctrine of regional transformation globally, but in this case particularly in the Middle East. So, we’re not talking about hypotheticals here, regardless of all the discussion the Bush administration would like you to believe there is about diplomacy. There is no diplomacy, as was the case with Iraq. Diplom
acy is but a smokescreen to disguise the ultimate objective of regime change.”

Anyone who is making the case that Iran has a reasonable regime that just wants some respect is probably quite blind to the faults of that tyrannical and medieval government in Tehran. They are limiting Internet access, for one thing (from the LA Times):

“Iran‘s Internet service providers have started reducing the speed of access for computers in homes and cafes based on new government-imposed limits.

An official said last week that service providers were forbidden by the Telecommunications Ministry from providing Internet connections faster than 128 kilobytes per second, the official IRNA news agency reported. He did not give a reason.”

They don’t need a reason—it’s an arbitrary government by ayatollahs that oppresses its own people and fails to deliver broad economic opportunity. But every country has its problems, and in Iran’s case they are somewhat ameliorated by high oil and gas prices. America cannot handle another war, currently bogged down as it is in the countries east and west of Iran (Iraq and Afghanistan), so America should stop trying to intimidate and demonize Iran, and stop the Israelis from doing that too, and just wait until Iran actually attacks a country or something before threatening them. Deterrence has worked on Pakistan, they haven’t used nuclear weapons, and even North Korea faces an American arsenal of nuclear arms in Japan and South Korea that would intimidate anyone.

If the Israelis want to lose another war, that’s their problem. It’s time for America to pack up and go home. Yet a lot of speculation is swirling around aircraft carrier movements by the Navy. People should probably do something to stop a war with Iran, but as Arthur Silber wrote in his blog, the Democratic party probably can’t be counted to do it:

“As I discussed in detail the other day, just as in the case of the long leadup to passage of the Military Commissions Act, the Democrats have nothing to say about Iran except to echo the administration line that a potentially nuclear Iran — lying four to five years in the future, or even further — is “unacceptable” and “intolerable.””

The people setting the debate about Iran seem to include some of the same zealots and fabricators that encouraged the war in Iaq. In a letter to a Rolling Stone writer, Michael Ledeen provides this argument:

“Somehow imagining that I want to invade Iran, he quotes an article of mine in National Review Online in which I call for the United States to support regime change in Syria and Iran, as if that meant a military campaign.”

Well, no, maybe not (certainly not you personally), but it does sound like you think you know how to run that place (have you ever even been there?) better than the nuts running it now. “Regime change,” that’s still in the lexicon? Shut up.

[photo of Ehud Olmert: AFP via Yahoo]