Year: 2006

Threatening Iran is stupid and futile

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

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]

Resign, Bush and Cheney

Posted on by Daniel J. McKeown

Dick Cheney makes rather light of people’s “concern” about Iraq, as he puts it (via thinkprogress.org):

“Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.

On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.”

Another assessment of the “general overall situation” comes from the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins:

“Since accurate reporting is near impossible, the scale of that country’s collapse under three years of US and UK occupation is hard to measure. Civil war is normally indicated by death rates and population movements. Whether the figure of civilian deaths is 50,000 or ten times that number is immaterial; either is a horrific comment on the impotence of the occupation. The UNHCR estimates 365,000 internal refuges in Iraq this year alone. More are seeking asylum abroad than from any other nation.

A third of Iraq‘s professional class is reported to have fled to Jordan, a flight of skills worse than under Saddam. UN monitors now report 2,000 people a day are crossing the Syrian border. Over a hundred lecturers at Baghdad university alone have been murdered, mostly for teaching women. There are few places in Iraq where women can go about unattended or unveiled. Gunmen arrived earlier this month at a Baghdad television station and massacred a dozen of the staff, an incident barely thought worth reporting. The national museum is walled up. Electricity supply is down to four hours a day. No police uniform can be trusted. The arrival anywhere of an army unit can be prelude to a mass killing and makes a mockery of the American policy of “security transfer”. All intelligence out of Iraq suggests this is no longer a functioning state.”

Rounding up the grim news in Iraq, Juan Cole counts the bodies and reports on the endemic corruption of the American-backed Iraqi government:

“Reuters reports political violence in Iraq‘s unconventional civil war. It lists about 20 persons dead and dozens wounded in bombings and shootings.
AP gives a separate and mostly different list than Reuters of the dead and wounded, mentioning attacks in Balad-Ruz, Fallujah and elsewhere.
Then AFP reports at least 10 assassinations in the southern port city of Basra, which the other wire services didn’t manage to find out about.

The Interior Ministry fired 3,000 men on Tuesday on suspicion that they had been involved in the extra-judicial killings that have plagued Iraq.”

James Baker can say whatever he wants, but having Baker lend cover for backing away from “victory in Iraq” and “stay the course” along with meeting Sean Hannity and other extremist right-wing talk radio hosts at the White House won’t solve George W. Bush’s political problems. Nothing ever will with such a literally atrocious record. November would be as good a time as any
for Bush and Cheney to both resign, or be impeached and removed by Congress if they refuse.

Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have long colluded with the Bushes on issues from the Iraq war to flag burning. Now they are shilling for torture, Bill on NPR and Hillary in this New York Daily News blog:

“But at yesterday’s Daily News editorial board meeting, it emerged that she’s not actually against torture in all instances, and that her dispute with McCain and Bush is largely procedural.

She was asked about the “ticking time bomb” scenario, in which you’ve captured the terrorist and don’t have time for a normal interrogation, and said that there is a place for what she called “severity,” in a conversation that included mentioning waterboarding, hypothermia, and other techniques commonly described as torture.

“I have said that those are very rare but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing that,” she responded. “Again, I think the President has to take responsibilty. There has to be some check and balance, some reporting. I don’t mind if it’s reporting in a top secret context. But that shouldn’t be the tail that wags the dog, that should be the exception to the rule.””

Certainly Bush and Cheney are a great part of the problem but as can be seen from the Clintons the country’s authoritarian and war-mongering trend is from many sources–and many people are small, sometimes unwitting accomplices to this “conservative” ideology of madness that America has been under. As Arthur Silber points out in this republished essay, something has stopped many people from trying to understand the complexities and specifics of the world beyond our shores:

“The U.S., and most of the American media, have been and remain resolutely determined to look at the wrong history. They act as if Iraq‘s own history, including its long, bloody history of ethnic strife (pace Wolfowitz), is entirely irrelevant. It is hardly a mystery why they are then unable to grasp what is right before their eyes. They look at events in Iraq (to the extent they do look at them, which is far from comprehensive as Cockburn makes very clear) through the prism of ideas they have gleaned from other countries’ histories — and the reality of Iraq itself never assumes solid shape before them.
This determined refusal to look at and understand the relevant facts, including the crucially relevant history, is a significant part of the reason why Bush’s repeated mantra that “everyone wants freedom,” and moreover that everyone wants freedom in roughly the same form that we enjoy it, is so hollow and so unconvincing. It was not true in Vietnam, and it is not true in Iraq. Peoples’ attitudes, objectives, alliances and enmities are uniquely shaped by their particular history — not by ours, or by no history at all. And it is the latter that is unavoidably implied by the attitude revealed by Bennet in his article, and by the Bush administration: they seem to believe that “freedom” and “democracy” are abstractions that are plucked by people from the sky overhead — and then applied by everyone in precisely the same manner, regardless of history, geography, culture and every other aspect of their specific lives.
…
[T]his is yet another reason why I maintain, as I explained yesterday, that we should leave immediately, or as close to immediately as we can — and set a time limit of six months at the outside, for example, for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops. Not only are we a significant source of the ongoing violence, but we continue to refuse to learn about the nature of the Iraqis themselves, and what their perspectives and their aims are.”

Glenn Greenwald blogs at Unclaimed Territory about the draconian, unnecessary law on detainees:

“The so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006 (.pdf), signed into law yesterday by President Bush, is replete with radical provisions, but the most dangerous and disturbing is that it vests in the President the power to detain people forever by declaring them an “unlawful enemy combatant,” and they then have no ability to contest the validity of their detention in any tribunal. The President now possesses a defining authoritarian power — to detain and imprison people for life based solely on his say-so, while denying the detainee any opportunity to prove his innocence.”

NPR gives this update on the spike in violence in Iraq:

“The Pentagon confirms the deaths of 10 more American soldiers in Ir
aq in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll for October to 69. The Muslim season of Ramadan has been violent in each of the four years U.S. troops have been in Iraq.

But this year, as American troops get more involved in the struggle for control of Baghdad, they are increasingly caught in a crossfire between Shiite and Sunni militias gunning for one another.”

[photo: Reuters via Yahoo]