Why war on Iran is inevitable

Eleven years of non-stop war later and the US political establishment is as moronic as ever:

Instead of doing penance every single day for the rest of their natural lives for the deaths of 4,422 Americans and, according to a survey from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the deaths of at least 650,000 Iraqis, the architects and principal advocates of the Iraq war angrily brayed for more: more aggression, bigger military, more wars. And the non-neo conservatives, the ones who’ve been proven definitively right by history, seemed to just meekly nod along. The DNC didn’t even issue a press release all day. And so all the lessons that could have been learned are unlearned.

Fuck you, you lying ass warmonger

Obama: a more eloguent, more acceptable Bush:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action.

Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now – and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance – would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

There wasn’t one Afghan amongst the September 11 hijackers (but plenty of Saudi Arabians, plus some Egyptians and Lebanese), nor amongst the planners 9the chief of which was Kuwaiti). But you can bomb nice allied countries like Kuwait, Egypt or Saudi Arabia so poor Afghanistan was duly elected as America’s collective stress ball/punching bag; blowing up a few goatherds and wedding parties would make the country feel better about itself. A quick victory and then on to Iraq. But as per usual the Afghans didn’t take kindly to foreign “liberators” — trading in Taliban asshats hassling you about the length of your beard for foreigners just killing you at a checkpoint for stopping your car too slowly isn’t as great a bargain as you might think it is — and took up arms against them. So now Obama is stuck with a war that despite his protestations is eerily reminiscent of Vietnam (and an earlier generation of US politicians didn’t hesitate to call it that when it was the Russians who were bogged down there) and his coalition of the willing –to coin a phrase– doesn’t seem too keen to me to get involved more.

And why would they? At this point the only reason why “winning the war in Afghanistan” is so important because the US’ collective ego is so massively tangled up in it, just like it is in Iraq and was in Vietnam. America cannot lose another war so needs to bring things to a convenient stopping point and then get the hell out of Afghanistan (modulo some residual force remaining behind for a couple of decades or so, as is the plan in Iraq). Who would want to get more involved in that (apart from the Brits and the Dutch obviously, both striving to be teacher’s pet)?

You might argue Obama had this war forced on him by the decisions of the previous administration. Perhaps, but even before he was elected he had already show himself to be in favour of a increased effort in Afghanistan. The plan was always to de-emphasise Iraq and intensify the war on Afghanistan. And meanwhile demands have already been made for “strong action” against Iran…

Obama is another LBJ, a warmonger at heart only without the corresponding liberal domestic programmes.

Tracking, with closeups (1): Iran

Six years ago everybody ignored Scott Ritter when he told the world Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Here’s your chance to ignore him again, as he explains that Iran hasn’t got an a-bomb nor seems to be anywhere near making one either. Key paragraph:

Never forget that sports odds makers were laying 2:1 odds that either Israel or the US would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities by March 2007. Since leaving office, former vice-president Dick Cheney has acknowledged that he was pushing heavily for a military attack against Iran during the time of the Bush administration. And the level of rhetoric coming from Israel concerning its plans to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran have been alarming.

Obama may have been elected with the electorate hoping for a more sane foreign policy and he’s certainly more diplomatic and less likely to pursue stupid policies just to show who’s boss, but that doesn’t mean America’s foreign policy goals have changed. Though there have been some well publicised attempts at reconcillation with Iran, underlying it have been the constant demands for Iran to give up its nuclear programme, to stop working on nuclear weapons, despite the lack of evidence for this. Though of a much lower intensity than the similar propaganda campaign and pressure tactics we saw in 2002/03 in the runup to the War on Iraq. Are we’re seeing the same thing happening to its neighbour?

Splinty says:

Well, the news today has been led by Iran. At the Pittsburgh G20 summit, we’ve had Irish-American leader Fionnbarra “Barack” O’Bama, with Brown on one side of him and Sarko on the other, indulging in some serious sabre-rattling. Taken alongside Netanyahu’s apocalyptic tubthumping at the UN, it’s all horribly reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq war, and I’m just waiting for the sexed-up dossier proving that not only has Iran nukes, but it could launch them at Britain in 45 minutes. A few thoughts occur. One is to wonder if the Russians have ratted out the Iranians as a quid pro quo for not having a deployment of US missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. Another is to wonder how this is going down with those two well-known allies of democracy, the pro-Iranian government of Iraq and the pro-Iranian government of Afghanistan. Finally, it strikes me that this is probably not a good time for Ahmadinejad to start winding the Jews up with his hilarious stand-up routine on the Holocaust.

ADDENDUM: on a semi-related topic Ingrid Robeyns on the firing of Tariq Ramadan from the university of Rotterdam for having a shown on the Iranian PressTV.

Iranian voters fail to behave as they should

Like Jamie I don’t share the Foreign Policy magazine’s experts certainty that the Iranian elections were rigged. Iran has a reasonable reputation for holding honest elections, even if they are, as Jamie puts it “engineered to produce the right results from the outset through candidate selection and so on”. Western experts and expat Iranians may have been convinced that Ahmadinejad was to be wiped from the pages of time and see the failure of this as evidence of voting fraud, but that doesn’t mean reality has to conform to their wishes.

The reason expert opinion has gotten it so wrong it seems to me is not fraud, but the myopia with which western news media and experts approach Iran: through the prism of US foreign policy. Iran is only in the news whenever its supposed nuclear weapons programme is brought to our attention again, or it’s accused of meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same way Ahmadinejad is only quoted when he says something stupid about the Holocaust or is supposed to threaten Israel with extinction again. We only get to see Iran as a menace and Ahmadinejad as a clown, with nobody really covering the reality of Iran’s internal politics.

So we get an incredible distorted view of Iran and Ahmadinejad and because we don’t like him we automatically assume this is the default view in Iran as well. But as Splinty points out, in the country itself he has a quite different reputation; he may not be liked by the western-orientated middle class, but he’s a friend of the poor and the peasants and they vote too.

And of course, expecting Iranians to vote according to our views of their foreign policy is as absurd as to have expected the last Dutch elections to have been decided on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq.

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

Well, at least Obama won’t bomb, bomb Iran…

You can’t expect too much from a presidential debate of course, as everything has both to be filtered through the Beltway Consensus and be spoonfed to idiots (Or do I repeat myself), but this is disappointing nonetheless. A lot of blather about whether or not the president should meet with Iran without “pre-conditions”, but nothing from Obama that challenges the lie that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and is therefore a threat to Israel. Instead, we get Obama’s good cop, diplomacy first shtick versus McCain’s hardline “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” bad cop act.