Monday, May 08, 2006
The Iranian Threat
The fact that Victor Davis Hansen and Charles Krauthammer were dead wrong about Iraq and the ensuing war hasn’t stopped the Chicago Tribune from featuring their articles in the Commentary Section (at the expense of more responsible journalists like Molly Ivins, who still only makes incredibly rare appearances in the Tribune). The Tribune is officially dead to me, but Krauthammer is a nationally-syndicated neocon, who, for reasons inexplicable to me, hasn’t been tarred and feathered and run out of town.
He, of course, is all about challenging Iran now, much as Michael Ledeen and the writers at the American Standard are. He starts his latest article with a sad reminiscence on the history of the Holocaust, of course, apparently an effort to use that to justify another pre-emptive war in Iran., though he offers no specifics as far as a solution to the problem, echoing an earlier editorial of his a month or two ago. Poor Charles has, in the past, evidenced a certain amount of frustration over the difficulty of dealing with Iran with a war. For now he is just cheerleading a strong response, painting the threat of Iran in the starkest of terms, with the Holocaust as a backdrop, and with selected quotations from Iranian leaders that reflect their most extreme statements.
I imagine in Iran some are doing the same thing, referencing Bush’s line “God told me to strike Al Qaeda, and I did…” as evidence that Bush is a nutcase who talks to God personally. This would mirror neoconservative efforts to quote Iran’s president talking about the “twelfth imam” as evidence that he is also a lunatic bent on self destruction in an effort to remake the Middle East.
Krauthammer references an Iranian general who says that Iran will target Israel if America “makes mischief” in Iran. Of course, the general is just one general, and he doesn’t say how Iran will target Israel if the United States attack Iran. Call me crazy, but I think it is more likely that Iran will use Hamas before it will lob a nuclear weapon,
I have a kind of personal distaste for Krauthammer, as I was convinced by him, among others, that the war in Iraq was necessary. Krauthammer was dead wrong, and the administration was dead wrong, not to mention duplicitous.
I might say, if I was being generous, that Krauthammer and this administration have pissed away their credibility and political capital in the sands of Iraq, but that would be more of an analysis of their current political situation rather than an expression of my person feelings. My own feeling is that Krauthammer and this administration have a long history of selectively focusing on a foreign country they don’t like for geopolitical reasons and blowing up every sin ever committed by that government to ten times life size, endlessly beating the war drum and playing on the fears of Americans until they have a fragile mandate for an invasion, which they will summarily bungle.
North Korea actually has a nuclear weapon or two, by most estimates, and the words of Kim il Jung are no prettier than those of Ahmadinejad. But this administration is not eager to get involved in another land war in Asia. The prospects for success are similarly dim in Iran, with most military planners taking a land invasion off the table and asserting that bombing will, at best, delay Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon by a few years, and will in the short term lead to massive reprisals in the Middle East, not to mention oil prices that are simply incomprehensible, leading to possible recession in the United States. You will not find this kind of balanced assessment from Krauthammer, who has simply made a career out of one-sided assessments of international situations. Krauthammer is eager to discuss the danger without any mention whatsoever of the consequences of American action.
Of course, we might dwell on the sins of many dictators in world, including in Zimbabwe or Turkmenistan, but we all understand that Zimbabwe doesn’t sit in the middle of the world’s oil reserves. Nor is Turkmenistan’s government a threat to anyone other than her own citizens. We can only “save” a few nations in this world, and those nations all seem to be oil rich.
Of course, totally absent from this discussion is any mention of the will of Iranians or anyone in the Middle East. Or even anyone on Earth, really. China and Russia are adamantly opposed to military action against Iran. They are even reluctant to pursue sanctions. Europe also prefers a more moderate approach.
Does anyone in America dare to consider what Iranians or Iraqis want in this conflict? Is it treasonous to know thine enemy? Iranians hate their clerics, who have approval ratings in the teens with the young population of Iran. Internal dissent has been growing in Iran for years. With America threatening war, however, this dissent, of course, has been silenced. People rally around their leaders in times of war, as we well know.
Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon in the future. It is not a fact in dispute. The only question is how many years will it take, and what government will be in control when it happens.
Iran is not the only nation that will acquire nuclear weapons in the next ten or twenty years. Technology has an amazing way of proliferating throughout the world with time. Forty years ago heart transplants were so cutting edge that only a few hospitals in the world dared to perform them. Today the better hospitals in Uruguay are capable of such a procedure.
It is difficult to argue against fearmongers and patriots who wrap themselves in the flag, especially when the ugliest consequences of their actions happen years down the road, especially when the full consequences of their actions are only revealed with the passage of time. Kennedy’s reckless attacks on Fidel Castro led to the Soviet Union redoubling its efforts in this hemisphere for decades. US military intervention in Korea and Vietnam led to China checking our progress in those nations completely..
Today, in America, it sounds almost reckless to speak of engagement with Iran, like using diplomacy and international pressure should only be a bone thrown to critics before the inevitable invasion.
Diplomacy and engagement have many upsides: no one dies, enemy powers don’t retaliate in kind as they do with military intervention, and dissent against the governing powers of foreign nations is encouraged. The Soviet Union never fell under a US invasion: it collapsed under the weight of its own oppressive government.
But it’s not very sexy to say we have to sanction or isolate an oppressive government and then “wait it out.” But it’s amazing what dialogue can do. China checked us in Korea with infantry reserves. We actually fought a land war with the Chinese army in 1952. They also supplied North Vietnam with supplies in the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese actually hated the Chinese for centuries of colonialism. The Chinese even invaded Vietnam a few years after we left, in 1978. The simple dynamic was that Vietnam and China jumped into bed together in the 1960s because they both preferred to use each other as allies rather than allow Vietnam to fall under US influence.
Despite this antipathy we had with China in the fifties and sixties Nixon still opened up a dialogue with the country that we had previously waged war on not that many years before. Nixon and Communist China had a common enemy in Communist Russia.
Communist countries did give each other aid, from time to time, but the myth of the Cold War, that Communism was taking over the globe in a monolithic red bloc, was simply a lie. Communist countries regularly fought each other, and they routinely only aided each other to protect themselves against US domination. The Soviet Union encouraged communist governments and resistance movements to oppose US influence, and to gain influence in foreign nations, but fundamentally the Soviet Union had about as much in common with Communist Vietnam as the United States did with the Suharto dictatorship: they were casual allies of convenience. Domestic issues, laws, and traditions dominated their politics.
The point is that Communism was never a monolithic bloc threatening the United States, as it was portrayed at the time by cynical politicians who knew better. It was a loose association of nations that frequently allied against each other.
The American people have a long history of being duped by politicians and pliant or bought pundits who reinforce cultural myths for political gain. US politicians have regularly spent the lives and treasure of this country in unnecessary foreign wars. I and many others thought that we has learned about the price of a rampant CIA after the seventies and the Church Commission, only to discover, with Reagan, that conservatives had never given up on the most brutal and immoral uses of the CIA. I and many others thought that we had learned a lesson in Vietnam. To read today’s Weekly Standard, apparently the only lesson that some learned was that we needed to fight harder, and longer, and spill more blood, and spend another half a trillion dollars to “liberate” a country we destroyed, to prop up a dictatorship we despised, to gain an ally in the most unimportant corner of the globe.
I have not even mentioned the fact that invading Iraq was an unambiguous violation of international law and the will of the vast majority of the people on Earth. Assualting Iran would be a similar violation. It simply doesn’t occur to Americans to really care about those things, but then we are shocked, shocked, when terrorists fly planes into the twin towers.
If Iran is so incredibly dangerous why are China and Russia so unconcerned? Yes, they get a lot of their oil from Iran, but we get a lot of our oil from Venezuela, and that doesn’t stop us from threatening Hugo Chavez.
The truth is the entire Middle East supplies such a massive amount of the world’s oil that even if a nation doesn’t get its oil from a specific nation in the Middle East oil prices are underpinned by all Middle Eastern nation’s production. If the United States dropped off the face of the Earth our disappearance would have no real effect on the world’s price of oil or oil supply (we have 3%). If the Middle East dropped off the face of the Earth the world economy would plunge into disaster.
A disruption in Iraq’s flow of oil, for example, is the primary contributor to record new prices of oil we are seeing today. Even though the United States never got much of its oil from Iraq, the price of the oil we do get has gone up explosively, as the world market determines the price for oil.
China and Russia could diversify their oil supply away from Iran, if Iran was so unstable, and then deal with Iran with harsh sanctions or military action. They aren’t bothering to because they simply perceive no apocalyptic danger from Iran. If WWIII broke out in the Middle East with Iran nuking Israel all nations on Earth would lose. US and European allies would retaliate with nuclear strikes on Iran. Iran would cease to exist. Civil unrest in the Middle East would follow. World oil prices would simply become incredible. World markets would flounder with energy prices creating massive inflation and consumer duress as people would see their disposable income absorbed by massive but necessary transportation costs and petroleum product costs.
Even if Russia were stocked crotch to crown with anti-semites they would be devastated by nuclear war in the Middle East. The entire world would. But the truth is simply that world, for some amazing reason, sees far less of a threat in Ahmadinejad than we do.
The US press is simply bent. Our government and intelligence apparatuses are run by blatantly dishonest, fearmongering would-be imperialists. The Israeli lobby is strong, and the entire conservative media is dominated by a worldview that sees war as transformative, necessary, and efficacious.
They are wrong, They have always been wrong. War is neither transformative, nor necessary, nor efficacious with regards to Iran. War with Iran would be destructive, unnecessary, and fruitless. We would strengthen the hardliners in Iran for years to come, perhaps even for decades. We would guarantee terrorist attacks against our forces in Iraq and against Israel. We would face a greatly increased risk of terrorism on our own soil. All of this would buy us maybe three more years of time until Iran creates a nuclear weapon.
Iran’s president’s remarks have been taken out of context, inflated, and used to scare the American people into thinking that Iran must be attacked immediately. His remarks are unremarkable for several reasons.
First of all, the head of the Iranian government is Ayatollah Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad.
Secondly, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have forsworn the development of nuclear weapons. It is certainly debatable how honest they are being, but Khamenei has even issued a fatwah against the development of nuclear weapons. It simply begs the question to assume that they are trying to develop nuclear weapons.
Thirdly, Ahmadinejad is brash and somewhat loud-mouthed conservative in Persian politics. He retracts his harshest statements after the fact.
Fourthly, Ahmadinejad’s words have been misquoted and mischaracterized for months. For example, in October 2005 Ahmadinejad said that the “occupying regime” in Israel must be destroyed or wiped off the map. He also said that Israel is a “disgraceful stain” on the Muslim world.
His comments were roundly criticized by Europe, Russia, the UN Security Council, and even Turkish, Egyptian, and Palestinian leaders.
In December 2005 Ahmadinejad questioned the Holocaust and expressed sympathy for Palestinians, saying that if Europe wanted to make amends with Jewish people by giving them a homeland they should have done it in Europe, not in “Muslim” lands.
Ahmadinejad backpedaled in the face of worldwide criticism for his remarks, insisting in January 2006 that his October speech had been misinterpreted and that he was simply trying to say that Palestinians should be given more freedom. He, awkwardly, admitted that the Holocaust might have happened and that he would accept any European explanations regarding history.
If Nixon could engage Communist China in the days of Mao Tse Tung we can engage Iran. We don’t have to like their government.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 8:09 PM 
