IRAN: The Threat

[Pujah]

Volume 55, Number 12 · July 17, 2008

Iran: The Threat

By Thomas Powers

 

At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.

 

Keep in mind that the rising price of oil already threatens the world's economy. Iran also has a large army and deep ties to the population of Shiite coreligionists next door in Iraq. The American military already has its hands full with a hard-to-manage war in Iraq, and is proposing to send additional combat brigades to deal with a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yet with all these sound reasons for avoiding war with Iran, the United States for five years has repeatedly threatened it with military attack. These threats have lately acquired a new edge.

 

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are the primary authors of these threats, but others join them in proclaiming that "all options" must remain "on the table." The option they wish to emphasize is the option of military attack. The presidential candidates in the middle of this campaign year agree that Iran is a major security threat to the United States. Senator Hillary Clinton in the last days of April threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran—presumably with nuclear weapons—if it attacked Israel. Senator Barack Obama dismissed Clinton's threat as "bluster" in the familiar Bush style but agrees that Iran cannot be permitted to build nuclear weapons, and he too insists that a US attack on Iran is one of the options which must remain "on the table." The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, takes a position as unyielding as the President's: Iran must abandon nuclear enrichment, stop "meddling" in Iraq with support for Shiite militias, and stop its sponsorship of "terrorism" carried out by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Any of these threatening activities, in McCain's view, might justify a showdown with Iran.

 

Sometimes the President's threats are chillingly explicit. In April the administration released details of the intelligence that explained an Israeli air strike last September on a large, blocklike building in which Syria, with the help of North Korea, had allegedly been building a nuclear reactor. Releasing this information, Bush said in April, was Washington's way of "sending a message to Iran and the world for that matter about just how destabilizing nuclear proliferation would be in the Middle East."

 

The message to Iran was clear—stop or run the risk of a similar attack. Left ambiguous was the question of attack by whom—Israel, which proved itself willing with the attack in Syria, or the United States, which has more planes and missiles at its command? The kind of attack Iran might expect has been spelled out in news stories over the last few years. Some Iranian nuclear research sites are buried as much as seventy meters underground, and there are scores, perhaps hundreds of sites in all, so any serious American effort to destroy Iranian nuclear programs would require intense and numerous strikes by US bombers and missiles. For a time some administration officials lobbied to include the use of nuclear weapons in the strike options for attacking Iran's protected nuclear targets, but vigorous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff scotched that possibility two years ago.

 

Yet even conventional bombing attacks are acts of war; unprovoked they are acts of aggression. Iran has said it would respond to an attack but without specifying how. Possible counterattacks might target shipping in the Persian Gulf, or US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, or something else the US has not anticipated. Such an exchange could not long be confined to tit for tat. An all-out American bombing program might force Iran to capitulate, or it might not. The next step would be invasion, destruction of Iran's conventional army, occupation of Iran's capital, and change of Iran's regime, which has long been an openly declared policy objective of the United States.

 

Is there anyone outside the US government who thinks it makes sense to invite trouble on this scale? Even some insiders are of two minds. "Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need," Gates said in his speech at West Point, "and, in fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels. But the military option must be kept on the table."

 

Read more ...

[Pujah]

Three Amigos: Bush, McCain, Obama Draw a Blood-Red Line on Iran

by Chris Floyd

Thursday, 3 July 2008

 

The development of a nuclear weapon by Iran is the great, glowing, neon "red line" of American politics today, one that every single major player in the American power structure says cannot be crossed. An ironclad bipartisan consensus has formed on the issue: Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. Period. End of discussion. "All options are on the table" to prevent this from happening, George Bush has repeatedly declared, with John McCain singing along. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has hammered home the point even more forcefully: "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon -- everything."

 

"Everything" in a president's power includes the largest military machine in human history and the largest nuclear arsenal on earth, so this is not exactly an idle boast. In fact, the American bipartisan political consensus on Iran amounts to precisely this: putting a gun to someone's head and saying, "If you don't do what I want, I'm going to blow your goddamn brains out."

 

This Bush-McCain-Obama line was underscored this week by one of Obama's top foreign policy advisers, Anthony Lake, who said "the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world," the Financial Times reports.

 

Think of that: the biggest threat facing the world. Bigger than global climate change. Bigger than poverty and disease. Bigger than growing conflicts over shrinking resources. Bigger than terrorism (which was the last greatest biggest threat facing the world). Bigger than organized crime. Bigger than the Terror War operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, which continue to spawn so much death, ruin, extremism and economic turmoil. Bigger than all of these -- and all other threats facing the world -- is the prospect that Iran might, in Lake's words, "get on the edge of developing a nuclear weapon."

 

This is certainly a remarkable state of affairs, and one which provokes a very simple question: Why? Why is an Iranian bomb (or even the prospect of Iran "getting on the edge" of having one) the ultimate danger facing the world today -- a prospect so dire, so infinitely evil that even the most "progressive" operators in the power structure insist they would be willing to use nuclear weapons to stop it?

[Paragon]

^Now, take Obama's banner from your signature. The man has lost it in this issue.

[Pujah]

^^ I am actually this close to getting of the Obama bandwagon - first it was the 'muslim smear' thing than the Jerusalem must never be divided and now Iran and the FISA bill. My patience is running out but I am hopping he will be much better than McCain. So I will wait it out and see what he does next.

[Paragon]

Hey good luck lady

 

I'm not trust him to look after my goats anyday .