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Written by Chris Floyd
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Saturday, 06 February 2010 18:32 |
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Barack Obama's Bush-like "surge" in Afghanistan has not even reached its full strength yet, but it is already driving tens of thousands of Afghan civilians from their homes, as they flee an upcoming massive attack in Helmand province.
The attack -- which the Americans have been trumpeting far in advance -- is designed, we're told, to "protect" the people of the key town of Marjah from the twin scourges of Taliban nogoodniks and drug traffickers. Yet the primary effect of the much-publicized preparations has been to send the residents of the town running for their lives to escape becoming part of the "collateral damage" that always attends these protective, humanitarian endeavors.
Indeed, the real aim of the advance publicity for the attack seems to be forcing mass numbers of civilians to hit the road -- which will then allow the American and British attackers to claim that anyone left behind is an enemy. This in turn will free up the attackers to use heavy weaponry in a "free-fire" zone to clear out the "diehards."
This is, of course, the same strategy used in the savage destruction of Fallujah in Iraq. The city was marked for death after an angry mob mutilated four American mercenaries -- following a series of civilian killings by occupation forces in the preceding weeks: provocations that have been conveniently airbrushed from history (just like the U.S. massacre of Somalis that preceded the infamous "Black Hawk Down" incident). An initial attack on Fallujah failed in the spring of 2004, largely due to political heat from the vast civilian suffering that was being reported from the city, chiefly from its medical centers.
But in the following months, the noose was tightened around Fallujah's neck. Tens of thousands fled the city to escape the coming second attack, which was well-publicized in advance. Story after story -- or rather, puff piece after puff piece -- about the preparations streamed from the embedded mainstream media reporters. The ostensible aim of the attack was to "eliminate" groups of "diehard terrorists" using Fallujah as a base. But of course, the months of PR about the looming operation meant that the putative targets had plenty of time to slip away. And they did.
Even so, as soon as George W. Bush's re-election was in the bag, the attack was launched. This time, the US brass were careful to eliminate the main source of bad press in the first attack: hospitals were a prime target. As I noted at the time:
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
And now Marjah is being readied for the Fallujah option. (For as we all know, your real tough hombres never take any option off the table.) As the Guardian reports:
Ten of thousands of Afghan civilians are abandoning an area of central Helmland where UK and US forces are set to launch one of the biggest operations of the year. The evacuation of most civilians from the town of Marjah and surrounding areas will give commanders greater leeway to use mortars-and-air-to ground missiles which have enraged Afghans in the past when responsible for civilian deaths. ...
US generals have unusually made no secret of their plan for a major onslaught against the town close to Helmand's besieged provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Larry Nicholson, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force which will spearhead the fight, has said he is "not looking for a fair fight." ...
A spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, as the Nato troops are known, said that the main reason for publicity for the operation was to encourage insurgents to leave, but if civilians were also encouraged to evacuate that would be "helpful".
Yes, it's always helpful to do some pre-winnowing of a densely populated area before you destroy it with mortars and air-to-ground missiles. But of course, while thousands of civilians flee, thousands more have "remained because they could not afford to leave," the Guardian reports. How many of these will be re-classifed as "enemy fighters" when their corpses are found in the ruins?
The Afghans themselves know the score:
A Marjah resident, an elder reached by phone, who was not prepared to give his name, said he had evacuated his family a week ago because he feared "the worst attack ever".
"Always when they storm a village the foreign troops never care about civilian casualties at all. And at the end of the day they report the deaths of women and children as the deaths of Taliban," he said.
Slaughter, ruin, fear and exile: yeah, it's the Good War, all right! "The war we should be fighting," as our tough-guy libs kept telling us when putting their always serious, always "nuanced" objections to the Iraq "fiasco" in proper context. Well, they have it now, the war they always wanted. And who knows? Maybe soon they can have their own Fallujah! Won't that be a great apotheosis of Progressivism?
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 13:56 |
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The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating "news analysis" of the Administration's just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.
Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story -- that "forecasts 10 years out have no credibility" -- Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on "new domestic initiatives" for years to come. But let's let Sanger, savant and seer, tell it in his own words:
In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.
The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.
But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. ...
For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.
What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger's noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God's name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger -- like the rest of our political and media elite -- literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.
And so this consideration, this possible outcome, does not figure in Sanger's "analysis" because it cannot: it lies far outside the scope of his consciousness. The only possible alternative he can conceive to the empire's bloody and bankrupting business as usual is some kind of divine intervention, "miraculous growth" or some "miraculous political compromise."
And make no mistake: the "miraculous political compromise" he is talking about has nothing to do with ending or even trimming the empire. A "compromise" on this issue could only be posited if there was some present conflict over it. But both parties are deeply committed to increasing spending on the wars and the war machine.
No, by "compromise" Sanger means some sort of "Grand Bargain" between the parties to cut Social Security and Medicare, along the lines of the "blue-ribbon panel" of entitlement cutters now being pushed by the Obama Administration. An effort to impose this kind of elitist, unaccountable commission failed in the Senate a few weeks ago -- although the Republicans have proposed such panels before, they didn't like this one because Obama proposed it -- but the idea will keep coming back. Sanger and the elite will doubtless get their "miracle" of slashing the remaining bits of the safety net to shreds in due time.
For these are the only possibilities for deficit-cutting that Sanger can even remotely contemplate: some whiz-bang new techno gizmo -- or maybe some hot new "financial instruments" cooked up by Wall Street -- that will goose the economy with a bright new bubble ... or else finally telling our old, sick, vulnerable and unfortunate to just crawl off and die already. That's it. That's all that our elite can envision.
Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire -- and its global gulag -- would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants -- and inciting revenge and resistance.
This would release a flood of money for any number of "new domestic initiatives," while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.
This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society -- more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.
But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot -- or, to be more accurate, will not -- imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire -- a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.
And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.
A better world -- again, not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better -- is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire -- carefully, safely, with deliberation -- over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise -- and worship -- of unrestricted power that empire entails. They will not accept -- or even contemplate -- any alternative to it.
And thus every option and policy we are offered -- whether from right-wing Republicans or "progressive" Democrats, or from "serious" news analysts on "serious" papers -- must fall within these pathetically cramped, constricted mental horizons. Empire -- the imposition of dominion by violence and threat of violence, and the financial and moral corruption this breeds, the malevolent example it sets at every level of society -- is the canker in the body politic. Until it is dealt with, there will be no healing, no hope, no change -- just more degradation and disaster all down the line.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Friday, 05 February 2010 15:54 |
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Here's the way the game works. First you get the outright lie, then later, in dribs and drabs, you get a few, grudging crumbs of the truth.
For example, first you get: "No, there are no Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. None. That's just a conspiracy theory, terrorist propaganda. These kinds of lies just make it harder for us to do good in the region." Then later: "Well, yes, we do have Blackwater operatives in Pakistan. But, uh, we don't actually cut their checks directly in the Pentagon."
Or what about this more recent example? First: "The United States has no troops in Pakistan. None. We are not going to send troops to Pakistan. That's just wild talk, a conspiracy theory. And it makes it harder for us to do good in the region."
Then later: "Well, yes, we do have a few troops in Pakistan. All right, a couple hundred. But that's it. We promise. And they're just training their counterparts in Pakistan's military. Oh yeah, and also working alongside paramilitary militias in the frontier regions. And maybe, you know, following up on some of our drone strikes. That is, our alleged drone strikes, because we are not, as you know, officially admitting that we are carrying out an ever-accelerating campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, although if we were, these strikes would be very surgical, and the hundreds of people who might have been killed in just the past few months by these strikes, if they happened, would have all been vicious savage murdering 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! terrorists. But other than these 200 troops we have in Pakistan now, we have no troops in Pakistan. Never have. Except, of course, for the 12 American troops who have been killed in, well, battle, in, er, Pakistan since 2001. But that's it. Look me in the eye; would I lie to you?"
Yes, yet another aspect of what must be the most unsecret secret war in history has been rumbled. American troops are on the ground in Pakistan – and getting killed there. As the world now knows, three American soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing (which also killed six Pakistanis, as if anyone cares) in a remote frontier province in Pakistan this week. The bombing took place in an area that had supposedly been cleared in the savage, swoopstake "counterinsurgency" operations launched by Pakistan at America's insistence. (Operations which, we were told at the time, had no American involvement whatsoever.)
Yet as the Pakistani paper The News points out, this massive "clearing" operation – which cleared more than a million people from their homes as they fled the fighting – could not stop the insurgents from placing a huge 70kg bomb "in an area that had reportedly been 'cleared' and moreover plant it on such a high-profile target that should have been guarded as closely as possible given that 'foreign visitors' were on their way. Nobody noticed a 70kg bomb being buried in the road?"
All this might suggest to a cynic that our much-ballyhooed "counterinsurgency doctrines" (and they are indeed treated as holy writ, handed down by St. David Petraeus) are not, perhaps, as entirely effective as they might be – especially considering the vast cost in innocent life they exact, and the hatred and extremism they engender.
Noel Shachtman at Wired has a couple of useful roundups (here and here) on the latest revelations of our sure-enough war in Pakistan. But equally revealing are some of the remarks he passes along from readers, and his own response: exchanges which demonstrate that, sadly, it is not only our elites who are marinated in "a sense of imperial entitlement and dominance" (as we noted here the other day).
Shachtman notes how the new revelations give the glaring lie to the solemn promises made by Obama's "special envoy" to the region, Richard Holbrooke. Speaking in Brussels last May, Holbrooke declared:
"The heart of the problem for the West is in western Pakistan. But there are not going to be US or NATO troops on the ground in Pakistan. There is a red line for the government of Pakistan and one which we must respect," he said.
(Parenthetically, isn't it rather strange that the "heart of the problem" for our militarist mandarins always seems to lie outside the borders of the country they are ravaging? So the "real problem" in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan. And, as we were told repeatedly for years, the "real problem" in Iraq was actually Iran, whose nuke-mad mullahs kept stirring up our lazy, docile darkies in Iraq. Tony Blair stuck to this line, well, religiously in his recent canard-o-rama at the Iraq inquiry in London. It was Iran who caused all our problems in Iraq, he said over and over; in fact, he mentioned Iran 58 times in the course of his testimony, much of which was aimed at fomenting new war fever against Tehran.)
Shachtman also notes the fact that the Americans killed in Pakistan this week were not, by the Pentagon's own admission, super-duper secret agents, but part of a straightforward "counterinsurgency" program: "a widening war," as he says, rightly.
Then comes a pushback from various warbloggers. First, the pseudonymous Islamophobe armchair warrior "Rusty Shackleford" (I guess cowardice in the service of virtue is no vice, eh, Rusty?) weighs in:
“Admitting that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles would — literally — lead to a civil war in Pakistan. .. It is a catch-22, ironic, and duplicitous: but calling this a war is the same thing as losing it. Me, I’m willing to be called two-faced for sake of winning a war. Those that prefer consistency over victory are misguided.”
This is wilful ignorance with a vengeance. Obviously, Pseudo-Warrior believes that Pakistanis are too stupid to notice foreign troops fighting on their own soil. So as long as we don't admit "that we have troops on the ground engaged in combat roles," then those dumb Pakis will never know! Man, that's some crafty, subtile strategy there.
Shachtman then gives us the views of "Uncle Jimbo" at Blackfive:
It is fair to point out that the ops in Pakistan are more tightly tied to a shooting war than many others, but does that mean we should take them and shine a bunch of bright lights on them? … There is plenty of oversight operating where it belongs in classified briefings… The political environment in Pakistan is delicate as Hell so we properly tread lightly. A bunch of breathless stories about the mere possibility that we are cooperating more w/ Pakistan or that heaven forbid the evil Blackwater mercenaries are helping load drones doesn’t make doing any good there easier… It is smart and a proper use of Special Forces. Now let’s stop making their jobs harder by acting like something nefarious is going on.
Shachtman replies, reasonably, that, as noted, the Pakistanis already know what's going on in their own country, and that "secrecy is only fueling the paranoia and conspiracy theories — not to mention depriving Americans of their right to know how their blood and treasure is being spent." Shachtman also, perhaps out of courtesy, refrains from commenting on Jimbo's touching naiveté that our always wise and competent leaders will provide all the necessary "oversight" in their secret briefings.
But despite this display of common sense, Shachtman feels compelled to establish his own "tough realist" credentials. In response to Jimbo's claim that telling the truth about the U.S. war in Pakistan "doesn’t make doing any good there easier," Shachtman hastens to reply:
I hear that. And if this were some other, relatively small-scale SF operation (cough Yemen cough), I’d agree 100%.
And there you have it: the quintessential, unconscious response of the fully marinated modern American. Shachtman is not at all opposed to imperial agents carrying out deadly attacks in foreign lands at peace with the United States. The principle of unlimited violence -- the right of America to kill people anytime, anywhere in the world -- is never questioned. The only argument that "serious" people can have concerns the application of this principle; i.e., is it in our best interest to kill these people now, or wait until later, or maybe kill some other people instead, or build a few more schools while we're killing people or -- and this is as radical as our "serious" discourse allows -- should we even maybe hold off on killing people for just a little while, to let the lesser breeds cool down a bit, and rebuild our busted finances?
As we noted here the other day:
Our elites and their courtiers [and their commentators] literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.
And so these debates between chest-beating militarists and more thoughtful "moderates" over the proper application of imperial violence in foreign lands will go on. Because until the empire is dismantled -- until we bring America home -- there will be no end to these wars and op and "interventions," secret, open, two-faced or otherwise. And no end to the blowback of violence and retrogression they produce.
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Written by Chris Floyd
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Monday, 01 February 2010 22:57 |
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Even as progressives were savoring Barack Obama's "masterful" – indeed, "brain-searing" – performance at the House Republicans' retreat last Friday, their dazzling champion was busy applying himself with renewed and reckless vigor to that most un-progressive of occupations: saber-rattling around the world. The last few days have certainly seen a remarkable display of bellicosity by the Obama Administration, putting almost every tool in the militarist kit to use: nukes, ships, missiles, money, proxies and war-profiteering. With just a few flicks of the imperial wrist, Obama sent waves of destabilization through some of the most volatile regions on earth.
There was the sale of $6.4 billion in military hardware to Taiwan: a bumper crop of boodle for America's war-profiteering community, but a hard slap to the Chinese – who have responded to this stirring of hair-trigger cross-strait tensions by "canceling talks between senior Chinese and US officials on strategic security, arms control and nuclear non-proliferation," as the Guardian notes. Well, if there's one thing the world needs less of today, it's more cooperation on strategic security, arms control and nuclear non-proliferation, right?
Especially the latter. In fact, so unconcerned is Obama with nuclear proliferation that he is asking Congress to increase funding for the nation's nuclear arsenal by $5 billion, as McClatchy reports (via Antiwar.com). Much of this extra money will be spent on new facilities that will enable the government to build new nuclear warheads whenever it chooses. "There is no question that some counties, friends and foes, will see the increased spending as a sign of U.S. hypocrisy," said arms control expert Joseph Cirincione, in an obvious bid for the "Understatement of the Year" award. But this kind of higher hypocrisy is meat and drink for the American establishment, whose guiding motto for the earth's lesser breeds has ever been: "Do as we say, not as we do."
Obama was also busy slaughtering a few more villagers in Pakistan with his ever-accelerating "drone" attacks. The latest attack was Saturday night, which killed nine people in North Waziristan. This capped a month in which American drones killed "123 innocent Pakistanis," as The News of Pakistan reports. Ten of the 12 raids "went wrong and failed to hit their targets," but the robots did manage to assassinate three men alleged, by someone somewhere on some kind of evidence, or not, to be "al-Qaeda leaders."
The News also notes that the increase in drone killings by the United States (123 civilians killed this January in contrast to "only" 36 killings in January 2009) seems due in large part to "revenge attacks" by the U.S. in retaliation for the December 30 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents at a border base in Afghanistan. Everyone knew the American security organs would be stern in their reprisals for the attack; after all, the U.S. killed a million Iraqis as "payback for 9/11," to quote the rationale for war most often quoted by American soldiers as they stormed into Iraq in 2003. So at this point, 123 for seven seems almost a model of restraint. But it's early days yet; the Reprisal-by-Robot campaign will no doubt harvest much more blood fruit in the months to come.
II.
But of course, the centerpiece of Obama's wild warmonger weekend was the leaked-on-purpose news of the deployment of a bristling "missile shield" to four countries in the Middle East, along with the dispatch of even more warships to join those already poised with minatory intent around the Persian Gulf. The ostensible aim of this sudden outpouring of ordnance to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait is to "protect" these nations from an attack by Iran – a nation which has not attacked anyone for centuries, but which is itself under relentless, open, repeated threat of attack from, er, the United States, and one of its regional proxies, Israel.
Word of the new deployment came just hours after the U.S. Senate voted to impose even more draconian sanctions on Iran: crippling measures that will only make life much more wretched and dangerous for millions of ordinary Iranians. The Senate measures are aimed chiefly at strangling Iran's supplies of gasoline --- a truly noble act of "humanitarian intervention," which, if successful, would see deliveries of essential food and supplies grind to a halt, fire trucks and ambulances parked, schools closed, mass business failures across the country, with the subsequent loss of jobs, homes, health and opportunity. The Iranian ruling elite will of course be spared any of these discomforts – just as our own ruling elite forever escapes even the slightest unpleasant consequence of its actions.
Some observers seem to regard the Senate move as some kind of rebuke to Obama, "taking Iran policy out of his hands" by force; but the deployment of the new war machinery to the region – which was accompanied by sales of military upgrades to the savagely oppressive religious extremists in Saudi Arabia – shows that the American political elite is, as usual, marching in lockstep when it comes to "projecting dominance" and threatening grave punishments (up and including "obliteration," because, as we all know, "all elements of national power" are always "on the table" at all times) for any rogue nations that fail to follow the Potomac line. (And a comparison between the repressive regime in Iran and the far more repressive regime in Saudi Arabia shows us clearly that it the line-following, not lack of freedom, that determines whether a nation is "rogue" or not.)
But we should not see this weekend's machinations in the Persian Gulf as moving the United States closer to war with Iran. The United States has been at war with Iran for a long time now, running and/or assisting armed terrorist groups inside the country to kill scores of people year after year, as we noted here last year. No, what we are seeing now is just another "surge" in the barely covert war with Iran – a war that in some ways has been going on for decades, and flares up any time a government in Tehran fails to show due obeisance. As I noted in that earlier piece, which came out just before the disputed Iranian election, and just after yet another terrorist attack in Iran:
Because the ultimate aim -- the only aim, really -- of the militarists' policy toward Iran is regime change. They don't care about "national security" or the "threat" from Iran's non-existent nuclear arsenal; they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel -- or even more ludicrously, the United States -- even if Tehran did have nukes. They don't care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran's "sponsorship of terrorism," for, as we've seen, the militarists thrive on -- when they are not actively fomenting -- the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and 'justifies' its own ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.
No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran's current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no essential difference in aim or method between today's policy and that of 1953. (Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in the heart of the oil lands -- precisely what they wanted, and got, with the installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a half-century ago.
They play the long game, our militarists. For example, they agitated openly -- and plotted covertly -- for the invasion of Iraq for almost 10 years before they finally got their way. They have worked for 30 years now to restore a client regime in Iran, and today, with the relentless bipartisan demonizing of the Iranians -- and the "mushroom cloud" fearmongering over a non-existent nuclear weapons program -- they are as close as they have ever been to their goal.
The obscene folly of all this is so self-evident that it seems not only redundant but downright insulting to point it out. Yet in a land so marinated in its own myths, a nation whose imperial sense of entitlement runs so deep, embedded in so many unconscious, unquestioned assumptions that even its "progressives" cannot see the howling evil being done by their leaders (as long as those leaders make even the slightest "progressive" noises now and then), this redundant, insulting task remains an unfortunate imperative.
III.
And no one has laid out the case against attacking Iran with more depth, power, eloquence and persistence than Arthur Silber. What's more, Silber has offered practical steps that even those obsessed with retaining their "serious" and "politically savvy" cred could employ. Of course, most of these steps were first offered back in the bad old Bush days, when "progressives" were castigating the government for its reckless warmongering toward Iran -- not to mention its drone attacks on civilians in Pakistan, its plans for "modernizing" the nuclear arsenal, and its war-profiteering sale of death machinery in every volatile region on earth. Back then, you could still hope -- or pretend -- that the dissent against Bush's rapacious and criminal policies was more principled than partisan, and thus that reasonable suggestions for lowering the war fever might gain some traction.
These days, alas, we find that to many progressives, actions that were considered rank crimes and national shames under Bush have been magically converted into "tough choices," "necessary evils," "practical politics" or even far-seeing "11-dimensional chess" when they are committed by Obama. So the anti-war row is now a lot harder, and longer, to hoe.
But some hardy cultivators, like Silber, are still out there hacking away at the flinty soil, planting seeds of truth in the almost-but-quite-yet-impossible hope that they will bear good fruit some day, in some way, somewhere down the line. And so I urge readers to set themselves to school on some or all of these remarkable Iran-related articles by Silber, while following up on the wealth of links each one provides: here, here, here, here, here, and here.
(*And while you're there, consider contributing something to the tip jar, if you can. Silber continues to suffer from catastrophic health problems, and the website is his only means of support.*)
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