More by Justin Raimondo

[Herb Schaffler]

This administration, which has been [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. to the Israel lobby more than any other, has been increasing the volume in its war of words with Tehran since January of this year, and, as Bush's reign comes to an [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , there apparently remains one last act of perfidy the neocons will leave as their legacy. Bush's going away gift to the American people looks more than likely to be another war – one that truly does make the Iraq war seem like a "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " in comparison. It took a few years for the impact of the war in Iraq to be felt by the American people, and its full impact has yet to hit. Not so with the next war. The firing of a few shots at those speedboats sent the price of oil [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . Think of what a full-scale all-out war would do to the price of nearly everything. And for what?
Iran, a signatory to the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. seeking to build nuclear weapons, and that the production of nuclear energy for peaceful uses is the one and only goal of its activities on this front. This is more than Israel can say, far more. [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. the Israelis have nukes – the technology for which they probably [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. – and they are one of the few civilized countries who haven't signed the NPT and refuse to even discuss doing so.
If ever there was a nuclear rogue nation, then surely it is Israel. As Henry Kissinger [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of them in a 1969 memo to Richard Nixon: "The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons." Although the Iranians claim their nuclear program is geared exclusively toward peaceful purposes, that they have the option to act otherwise, should the need arise, is a challenge to Israel's nuclear hegemony. The Iranians, by American and Israeli lights, have no right to a deterrent.
In a world where "[LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. " is the goal of U.S. foreign policy, there is no right to self-defense; that, along with national sovereignty, has been abolished. Defiance is met with an implacable campaign for regime-change in the offending nation. By all [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , Iran is the next victim to be made an example of, sometime in mid-summer, or so the rumor goes.
We know where the presidential candidates stand on this issue. Hillary looks forward to the "obliteration" of Iran and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Charles Krauthammer's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. that we extend our nuclear shield over Tel Aviv just as we would do the same for, say, Toledo. Indeed, there are not a few who would argue that we would be fully justified in sacrificing the latter in order to save the former, and not all of them are to be found among Rev. Hagee's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . In any case, we know what the McCain-Hagee position is without even having to ask.
We also know where Obama stands on all or most of this: he advocates a policy of [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. with the Iranians, just as he has endorsed [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. South American caudillo Hugo Chavez, and for the same very sound reasons: because it's talk or fight. He clearly realizes waging perpetual war is hardly in our interests, even if we had the financial and military capacity to carry out such a crazed policy. Yet, if he's speaking out about this, at this crucial moment – when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is practically declaring war on the Iranians – then I just can't hear him: he must not be speaking very loudly, or perhaps this gets lost amid all the soaring rhetoric about Change and Hope and A Better Tomorrow.
Hillary voted for the [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , which designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards – an official part of the Iranian armed forces – as a "terrorist organization," and now Gen. Petraeus is [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. Tehran is funding, arming, and succoring those who are killing American soldiers and [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . The main threat against us in Iraq is no longer the Sunni "dead-enders," as Don Rumsfeld liked to call them, it's the Mahdi Army – Iraqi Shi'ites – and the Iranians, who have [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. close ties to the government our troops are dying to defend. If Bush seeks to obliterate Iranian hopes for regional preeminence by launching an attack before he leaves office, one can hardly see how the Clintons could possibly object: perhaps they'll declare that, this time, we have to send enough troops to "do the job." This, you'll recall, was Hillary's McCain-like critique of the Iraq invasion long before being antiwar was required of all Democratic presidential aspirants. No doubt she'll revert to that when the time comes, but what about Obama?
He could skewer [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. with one well-placed arrow, aimed straight at her vulnerability on the Iran issue. With the first shots of a new war already fired, apparently, and rumors of an imminent American strike at Iran flying thick and fast, Obama could denounce her as a warmonger, a McCain in drag, whose short-term political opportunism is helping to embroil us in a quagmire far worse than the one in Iraq, where she played a similar role in 2003. Yet I hear nothing like this coming from Obama's camp. Maureen Dowd [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , with her typically acerbic take:
"Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce. He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you've got to score points."
The American people oppose war with Iran, perhaps more than they want out of Iraq: the economic consequences alone will infuriate them far more than any other foreign policy decision of this administration. What the War Party is hoping is that their fury will be directed overseas, at our alleged "enemies" in Tehran, and not at home, in the direction of Washington, where proper blame belongs.
Americans await the advent of a real leader, the sort who could and would focus that anger on the right target. Whether Obama has the gumption – and the strategic sense – to make this fight about policy, not personalities, race, and gender, remains to be seen. He's promised us a new politics, but that doesn't have to mean blandness and an inability to fight. It can and must mean sharp attacks on wrong ideas – and one looks in vain for an idea as wrongheaded as war with Iran.
~ Justin Raimondo