As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon

By Joschka Fischer

As a result of misguided American policy, the threat of another military confrontation hangs like a dark cloud over the Middle East. The United States’ enemies have been strengthened, and Iran – despite being branded as a member of the so-called “axis of evil” – has been catapulted into regional hegemony. Iran could never have achieved this on its own, certainly not in such a short time.

A hitherto latent rivalry between Iran and Israel thus has been transformed into an open struggle for dominance in the Middle East. The result has been the emergence of some surprising, if not bizarre, alliances: Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraq are facing Israel, Saudi Arabia, and most of the other Sunni Arab states, all of which feel existentially threatened by Iran’s ascendance.

The danger of a major confrontation has been heightened further by a series of factors: persistently high oil prices, which have created new financial and political opportunities for Iran; the possible defeat of the West and its regional allies in proxy wars in Gaza and Lebanon; and the United Nations Security Council’s failure to induce Iran to accept even a temporary freeze of its nuclear program.

Iran’s nuclear program is the decisive factor in this equation, for it threatens irreversibly the region’s strategic balance. That Iran – a country whose president never tires of calling for Israel’s annihilation and that threatens Israel’s northern and southern borders through its massive support of proxy wars waged by Hizbullah and Hamas – might one day have missiles with nuclear warheads is Israel’s worst security nightmare. Politics is not just about facts, but also about perceptions. Whether or not a perception is accurate is beside the point, because it nonetheless leads to decisions.

This applies in particular when the perception concerns what the parties consider to be threats to their very existence. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats of annihilation are taken seriously in Israel because of the trauma of the Holocaust. And most Arab governments share the fear of a nuclear Iran. Earlier this month, Israel celebrated its 60th birthday, and US President George W. Bush went to Jerusalem to play a leading part in the commemoration. But those who had expected that his visit would mainly be about the stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were bitterly disappointed. Bush’s central topic, including his speech to Israel’s Knesset, was Iran. Bush had promised to bring the Middle East conflict closer to a resolution before the end of his term this year. But his final visit to Israel seemed to indicate that his objective was different: he seemed to be planning, together with Israel, to end the Iranian nuclear program – and to do so by military, rather than by diplomatic, means.

Anyone following the press in Israel during the anniversary celebrations and listening closely to what was said in Jerusalem did not have to be a prophet to understand that matters are coming to a head. Consider the following:

First, “stop the appeasement!” is a demand raised across the political spectrum in Israel – and what is meant is the nuclear threat emanating from Iran.

Second, while Israel celebrated, Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted as saying that a life-and-death military confrontation was a distinct possibility.

Third, the outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force declared that the air force was capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect the country’s security. The destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility last year, and the lack of any international reaction to it, were viewed as an example for the coming action against Iran.

Fourth, the Israeli wish list for US arms deliveries, discussed with the American president, focused mainly on the improvement of the attack capabilities and precision of the Israeli Air Force.

Fifth, diplomatic initiatives and UN sanctions when it comes to Iran are seen as hopelessly ineffective.

And sixth, with the approaching end of the Bush presidency and uncertainty about his successor’s policy, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is seen as potentially closing.

The last two factors carry special weight. While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.

Although it is acknowledged in Israel that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would involve grave and hard-to-assess risks, the choice between acceptance of an Iranian bomb and an attempt at its military destruction, with all the attendant consequences, is clear. Israel won’t stand by and wait for matters to take their course.

The Middle East is drifting toward a new great confrontation in 2008. Iran must understand that without a diplomatic solution in the coming months, a dangerous military conflict is very likely to erupt. It is high time for serious negotiations to begin.

The most recent offer by the six powers – the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany – is on the table, and it goes very far in accommodating Iran’s interests. The decisive question, however, will be whether it will be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before these negotiations are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.

“Oppose the war; support the troops.”

The idea had a certain strategic logic to it. Our opinion was a minority one, and offending the millions with military members in their families or otherwise close to them didn’t seem like a terribly bright way of getting the peace message across. We also somewhat accepted the logic that the people in the military had signed up to defend America; that they were being sent to a criminal war for profit on the other side of the globe wasn’t really their fault, they’d been hoodwinked.

So, all of those well thought out banner ideas like “US Military: Millions of Murderers in Uniform” were left aside so that we might more effectively get the peace message across and avoid offending anyone’s precious sensibilities. We stuck instead to our peace signs and our rainbows and our doves and our “No blood for oil” lines. We endured the taunts from the counter-protests: “My country, right or wrong!” “America, love it or leave it!” “Traitors!” and so on. And we gingerly protested in our carefully cordoned-off free speech zones or under city permit permission, got ourselves in the papers and all cried together and lit candles as the radio reports started coming in of the missiles and bombs striking Baghdad. And, of course, none of it made a damned bit of difference.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

It always bothered me, though, this “support the troops” idea. Sure, it was a smart strategic play, but in stark conflict to the rest of what we thought we were doing. We were here to bring the truth to an ignorant, deluded or sleeping public, and the whole truth, nothing but. That truth must have necessarily included the realization that these amorphous “troops” we were enjoined to support were actually individual, thinking, morally responsible men and women. It must have included the knowledge that each and every “troop” currently engaged in mass murder in our names had volunteered. And we knew, as they should have, that the murderous, destructive, obscene organization they volunteered to serve, hadn’t conducted a legitimate “defense of America” since at least WWII, and maybe as far back as the War of 1812, depending on whose Pearl Harbor narrative you believe.

They weren’t conscripted, they weren’t shanghaied, they weren’t tricked into signing up and donning the uniform and picking up the gun. They sought out the role, they agreed to follow orders, they signed the papers, and nowhere along the way did they somehow become transformed from individual human beings, morally responsible for their individual acts of violence and destruction into those collectively romanticized “troops”. Some small number said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and did the only moral thing possible, which was to desert. The rest marched freely onto the planes and ships and deployed, the willing agents of empire. Certainly in many, the thought was there afterward: “We didn’t sign up for that,” but still they went, perhaps finding their own moral cover in the notion they’d been tricked. Likely, most found no moral problem with going at all.

Even today, the “support the troops” mentality is embedded in the tactics and rhetoric of the organized anti-war movement, implicitly or explicitly. It’s considered bad form to condemn the American armed services en masse for their self-subjugation to the American empire’s war machine.

another victim of empire

Unlike Gulf War I, though, Gulf War II, freshly turned five years old, is an occupation. It is an obviously immoral war launched on the flimsiest of concocted excuses and conducted with the most sinister of aims. The history of Gulf War I, the suffering inflicted on Iraq by a decade of sanctions, the horror of depleted uranium weapons residues and unexploded landmines and other ordnance from the first attack should have made it obvious to anyone that a crime had been committed there. A massive, inexcusable, inhuman, monstrous, treasonous crime.

And yet, most of the military personnel that have served in the current conflict up to the present weren’t in the military for the first. They signed up, willingly. If they didn’t know the history of what the US military actually did for the prior fifty years, flag-waving nonsense and Cold War turned War on Terror hysteria aside, their foolishness should not excuse them. If they learned nothing from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon or other places that the empire had been sticking its nose and its guns into, well, we should let neither ignorance nor willful blindness be an excuse. Unjust, illegal wars do not just happen by themselves. They are the sum total of millions of individual decisions by millions of individually responsible people to obey, topped by whatever dark cabal is giving the orders for the week.

Further, probably close to half or more of those still in Iraq today signed up after the war’s justifications had evaporated, after the stories of casual murder, collective punishment and institutionalized torture were already splashed on television screens and across newspaper headlines worldwide. They, especially, should have known better.

So, I will not support the troops. In fact, fuck the troops! Each and every US serviceperson today who is not deserting, refusing to follow orders or turning their weapons on their commanders is, in fact, a criminal, and one for whom we should feel neither sympathy nor pity, let alone the specious solidarity of “support the troops” when it’s those same “troops” who are carrying out slaughter, destruction and torture in our name.

credit: wardolino @ flickr.com

At the same time, fuck all those who support the troops! If history, recent or ancient, hasn’t been sufficient to educate you on the true nature of war and the true nature of the predatory, inhuman power you seem so eager to serve, then damn you for your stupidity, damn you for your ignorance, damn you for your blindness, damn you for your fallacious morality. And this goes not only for every family member or friend of someone serving in the US military today who is NOT insistently urging their child or husband or wife or friend to desert or disobey, it goes also for every federal employee and for every shareholder and employee from janitor to CEO of the military-industrial-terrorism complex and the companies that comprise it: Blackwater, Halliburton, Boeing, General Dynamics, Allied-Signal, Unisys, Westinghouse, DynCorp, Exxon, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM, Hughes, KBR, Kearfott, Lockheed-Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Shell, AT&T, Sikorsky, United Technologies and all the rest. There is blood on your hands, real human blood — lives taken, families shattered, homes destroyed, crops ruined, populations displaced, tortures committed, atrocities sanctioned, all facilitated by your unthinking, odious, ignorant, unconscionable support.

This essay is in part a response to the writings of Arthur Silber, in a piece entitled “The Honor of Being Human: Why Do You Support?“

credit: vredevanutrecht @ flickr

In concluding, he states:

The Bush administration has announced to the world, and to all Americans, that this is what the United States now stands for: a vicious determination to dominate the world, criminal, genocidal wars of aggression, torture, and an increasingly brutal and brutalizing authoritarian state at home. That is what we stand for.

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, “Why do you obey?” but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, “No”? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

No, Arthur, I will not support.

March to War in Lebanon?

Statement on H Res 1194, “Reaffirming the support of the House of Representatives for the legitimate, democratically-elected Government of Lebanon under Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.”

May 20, 2008

Ron Paul

Madam Speaker I rise in opposition to H. Res. 1194 because it is dangerously interventionist and will likely lead to more rather than less violence in the Middle East.

I have noticed that this legislation reads eerily similar to a key clause in the 2002 Iraq war bill, H J Res 114, which authorized the use of force.

The key resolved clause in H. Res. 1194 before us today reads:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(6) urges–

(A) the United States Government and the international community to immediately take all appropriate actions to support and strengthen the legitimate Government of Lebanon under Prime Minister Fouad Siniora;

The Iraq war authorization language from 2002 is strikingly similar, as you can see here:

(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to–

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq ;

I am concerned that this kind of similarity is intentional and will inevitably result in US military action in Lebanon , or against Syria or Iran .

I am also concerned over the process of bringing this resolution to the Floor for a vote. I find it outrageous that H. Res. 1194, which calls for more risky US interventionism in the Middle East , is judged sufficiently “non-controversial” to be placed on the suspension calendar for consideration on the House Floor outside of normal order. Have we reached the point where it is no longer controversial to urge the president to use “all appropriate actions” — with the unmistakable implication that force may be used — to intervene in the domestic affairs of a foreign country?

Mr. Speaker, the Arab League has been mediating the conflict between rival political factions in Lebanon and has had some success in halting the recent violence. Currently, negotiations are taking place in Qatar between the Lebanese factions and some slow but encouraging progress is being made. Regional actors – who do have an interest in the conflict – have stepped up in attempt to diffuse the crisis and reach a peaceful solution, and press reports today suggest that a deal between the rival factions may have been reached. Yet at this delicate stage of negotiations the US House is preparing to pass a very confrontational resolution pledging strong support for one side and condemning competing factions. US threats in this resolution to use “all appropriate actions” to support one faction are in fact a strong disincentive for factions to continue peaceful negotiations and could undermine the successes thus far under Arab League moderation.

This legislation strongly condemns Iranian and Syrian support to one faction in Lebanon while pledging to involve the United States on the other side. Wouldn’t it be better to be involved on neither side and instead encourage the negotiations that have already begun to resolve the conflict?

Afghanistan continues to sink toward chaos with no end in sight. The war in Iraq , launched on lies and deceptions, has cost nearly a trillion dollars and more than 4,000 lives with no end in sight. Saber rattling toward Iran and Syria increases daily, including in this very legislation. Yet we are committing ourselves to intervene in a domestic political dispute that has nothing to do with the United States .

This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East . It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League. I urge my colleagues to reject this march to war and to reject H. Res. 1194.