by Juan Santos, 10/1/06
Part One: Pretending You
Didn’t Know
“Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz.” Daniel Ellsberg
The Democrats are silent as the Bush regime prepares
for war against Iran – silent in the face of a potential nuclear mass murder –
even a global war: silent in the face of an attack that could cause an utter
meltdown of the global economy, a 1930s style Depression that would send
millions, perhaps billions of people into starvation-level poverty, as the
prices of oil and gasoline triple.
The potentials for horror for tens of millions of
people in the region are almost unspeakable.
Such a war would quickly spread to Iraq – where
Halliburton’s “Green Zone” in Baghdad would be turned to instant rubble by such
missiles as were left for an Iranian counterstrike, giving US soldiers in the
Zone their own taste of Lebanon, even as Shia Muslims
turn a face of cold steel – or wild, inconsolable grief and rage – toward the
death of every US and British soldier, mercenary, spy, journalist, and
profiteer in Iraq.
According to Agency France-Presse,
the head of Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards said “The Americans know better than anyone that their
troops in the region and in Iraq
are vulnerable. I would advise them not to commit such a strategic error.
I would advise them to first get out of their quagmire in Iraq before
getting into an even bigger one.”
Iraqi Shi”ite leader Moqtada al Sadr has announced
that his Mahdi army would retaliate for a US attack on Iran.
A major defeat in Iraq
could lead immediately to a military draft, radicalizing, at last, the anti-war
movement in the US.
That war would spread throughout the region is all
but certain. Whether it could be contained to the region is entirely uncertain.
Militant forces in next door in Pakistan could rise
up, forcing loose that government’s shaky hold on power, and putting the
capacity for a nuclear counterstrike on US targets directly in the hands of the
“terrorists” Washington claims to fear and oppose.
40% of the oil on the world market would dry up
overnight as Iran
shut down the Straights of Hormuz in retaliation.
Were a counterstrike aimed at Saudi and other regional oil fields, a tripling
of world oil prices might well seem a modest projection.
Seymour Hersch has noted, “Should
war break out in the Middle East again” or should any Arab nation fire missiles
against Israel,
as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last
resort, would now be a strong probability.” Ariel Sharon put the matter more directly. “Arabs
may have the oil, but we have the matches,” he said.
In the West, Daniel Ellsberg has suggested a
connection between an attack on Iran
and rapid developments toward martial law in the US. Gerard Baker put it this way in
a pro-war London Times essay called “Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war
against Iran may be a necessity” .
” the kind of society we live in and cherish in
the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change
beyond recognition. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our
phones… Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our
governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or
truckload away from another Hiroshima.
By “another Hiroshima,”
he means a Hiroshima in the West, of course, –
that’s what’s “unthinkable” – not the Hiroshimas and
mini-Hiroshimas the US,
and in all likelihood, Israel,
will rain on the people of Iran.
An attack on Iran would be the farthest thing
from “clean” or “surgical.” The reality is that it would bring horrible death
to tens, even hundreds of thousands of people who live near US targets.
While the official line is to minimize the death
dealing potentials of nuclear “bunker busters” or Earth Penetrating Weapons (EPWs)of the kind sure to come into play against Iran’s
deeply buried nuclear energy facilities, the International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, begs
to differ.
An IPPNW
study concludes that:
“”even a very low-yield nuclear EPW exploded in or near an urban
environment” will inevitably disperse radioactive dirt and debris over several
square kilometers and could result in fatal doses of radiation to tens of
thousands of victims.”
These tens of thousands “would die excruciating
deaths over several days to a week or more.”
Daniel Ellsberg
told a gathering of World Can’t Wait
activists:
“Every nuclear weapon is a portable Auschwitz.
The first one that is used may kill only hundreds, depending on where they are
used, which would be extremely ominous. People would say, “Ah, they can be used
easily.” The use of nuclear weapons even in a deserted field against an
underground site by this country would bring us into a new era of history-the
consequences of which would so dwarf the Holocaust there would be simply no
comparison. The nuclear wars in our future-that would be started by an act now
being planned by this country-are Hitler-like to the hundredth degree.”
Even if the messianic Bush regime gets cold feet –
an unlikely proposition – the Jerusalem Post assures us that Israel, with its
200 nuclear weapons, may well “go it alone” against Iran.
In his 1997 book Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and
Foreign Policies, Israel Shahak wrote, “Israel
is preparing for a war, nuclear if need be, for the sake of averting domestic
change not to its liking, if it occurs in some or any Middle Eastern states….
Israel clearly prepares
itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East…, without hesitating to use for the purpose
all means available, including nuclear ones.”
They would no doubt have the backing of Ariel Sharon
sycophant Hillary Clinton and the House Democrats who all but unanimously voted
for a resolution supporting Israel’s
most recent war crimes in the devastation of Lebanon. Only 8 Democrats could be
found to oppose it.
With respect to Iran, one House member told Seymour
Hersch, “There’s no pressure from Congress” to avoid
military action. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do
it.” The coming war is an imperative of Empire, not just Republican extremism
or the compulsion of Christian fascists courting Armageddon.
In fact, an attack on Iran is straight out of the
Democrat’s playbook.
Stephen Zunes, Middle East Editor for Foreign Policy in Focus, remarked on
the Democratic Party’s 2004 platform:
“One possible target
for American forces under a Kerry administration is Iran. The platform implies an
American right to such military intervention by stating that “a nuclear-armed Iran
is an unacceptable risk to us and our allies.” No concern is expressed,
however, about the already-existing nuclear arsenals of Iran’s neighbor Pakistan
or of nearby Israel.
Iran has called for a
nuclear-free zone in the region, which the Democrats appear to reject,
apparently because it would require America’s regional allies to get
rid of their nuclear arsenals as well. The Democrats, like the Republicans,
believe that instead of pushing for multilateral and verifiable arms control
treaties, the United States
can effectively impose a kind of nuclear apartheid, unilaterally determining
which countries can have nuclear weapons and which countries cannot.”
Get that: Iran
has called for a nuclear free Middle East and
the Democrats and Republicans alike have rejected that call.
From Lieberman to Obama to Clinton
to Kerry to Harman to Bayh to Dean, the story is the
same. Robert
Dreyfuss writes
that “”just as the Democrats meekly got in line to support the invasion of Iraq, many (perhaps most) elected Democrats are
demanding a confrontation with Iran,
too. Some, such as Hillary Clinton, are even trying to out-Bush the president
in demanding a showdown with Iran.”
The Democrat’s position
paper on “defense,” “Real Security:
Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World”, says
Democrats will “roll back the nuclear threats of Iran
and North Korea.”
The document, gangster style, literally states that Democrats in power would
make “an offer Iran cannot
refuse” adding, “Iran
should understand the existential threat of military response””
“Real Security” calls for massively beefing up spending both on the
military and on so-called “Homeland Security,” while offering an
ever-so-slightly altered version of Bush’s policy of “staying the course” in
the occupation of Iraq.
The Democrats are the
furthest thing from a “peace” party.
Even liberal Democrat stalwarts like Barbara Boxer
have the mad gleam of war in their eyes. Boxer, faced with a claim by Iran that it has no interest in developing
nuclear weapons, recently raged on The
Ed Schultz Show that Iran should prove the point by signing the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran of course, is a signatory to that treaty,
and Boxer’s comments were the kind of rabid lie – let’s not be polite and call
it “misinformation” – that would have left liberals in a rage if it came from
the mouth of a Bush or Cheney.
The
Democrats refuse even to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq – although a
recent poll by Zogby International showed that 72% of U.S. troops serving in Iraq
believe that the United States should end its occupation of Iraq by the end of
this year, and even though 61% of Iraqis support Iraqi resistance attacks on US
troops. Oddly, the Christian Science Monitor says that the same percentage –
61% of people in the US –
oppose the war in Iraq.
87% of Iraqis want the US
out of their country.
A new
poll from Reuters
shows that only 9% of people in the US
favor air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.
But no
one in the Democratic Party cares what
we say, as long as we don’t make real trouble for them – trouble in the streets
– any more than they cared about the millions who marched in peaceful demonstrations
across the globe in a bid to stop the invasion of Iraq before it started. They voted
for it anyway, whatever excuses they offer now.
In a word, a vote for the Democrats is a vote for
war – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon
or, now, Iran.
It is an endorsement of US war crimes, of the policy of “pre-emptive war.” It
is a vote in favor of a nuclear Middle East
and of US and Israeli nuclear first strikes.
It’s also a matter of pretending you didn’t know.
The truth is
that there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. There is only capitulation to, cooperation with and endorsement of
evil, or resistance to it. A slow poison is no better than a fast one, once
you”re dead. And the more you swallow, of course, the more you will swallow. Only those who resist
merit support.
With respect to war, a vote for the Democrats has
one impact only; it changes nothing at
all but the voter – turning her into the moral equivalent of a “Good
German,” in her relationship to the oppressed peoples of the Third and Fourth
Worlds, even if she means only to oppose the Christian Fascists and Armageddon
mongers on the hard Republican Right.
US strategists are not
simple madmen – they are imperialists. There is a method and a strategy to the
madness, however insane an attack on Iran might appear, and however
immense the potential “blowback” to the Empire.
As Larry Everest notes,
the Bush regime “is not unaware of these various concerns. But its view is that
delay and equivocation will only make matters worse and give openings to the
U.S.’s regional and global rivals, and that it could lose the whole game if it
doesn’t maintain the momentum in the so-called “war on terror,” and
aggressively move forward.”
“This spring, UN Ambassador John Bolton declared (in
clear reference to military attacks possibly including nuclear weapons), “The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more
intractable it will become to solve” We must be prepared to rely on
comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the
threat that the Iranian regime poses.””
Iraq, Iran,
and “Weapons of Mass Destruction”
Democrats and Republicans alike
claim that Iran
is a “terrorist state,” one that can’t be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.
But there is no evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, any more
than there was any proof that Iraq
was developing one.
Military sources told
journalist Seymour Hersch that the U.S. has no proof at all that Iran is developing nuclear arms. Hersch has said that “The intelligence services of the United States, Great
Britain, France,
Germany, and even Israel, have been unable to come up with any
specific evidence of what’s known as a parallel or secret weapons program
inside Iran.”
One former senior intelligence
official told Hersch flatly, “People in the Pentagon
were asking, “What’s the evidence? We”ve got a million tentacles out there,
overt and covert, and these guys” (Iran) “have been working on this for eighteen
years, and we have nothing? We”re coming up with jack shit.””
The International Atomic
Energy Agency recently blasted a US Congressional report on Iranian
weapons as “outrageous and dishonest.” It also called the report’s argument that Iran’s
nuclear energy program is geared toward developing nuclear weapons
“erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated.”
The
IAEA pointed to five significant errors in the Congressional committee’s claim
that Iran’s nuclear
capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence had demonstrated, including a
false claim that Iran
has enriched weapons grade uranium.
According to the London Guardian,
the IAEA “said the report was “incorrect” in its assessment that Iran
had made weapons-grade uranium at a site inspected by the agency. Instead, the
letter said, the facility had produced only small amounts of uranium, which
were below the level necessary for weapons.”
In 2004, IAEA
Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said plainly, “I have seen no nuclear weapons
program in Iran.
What I have seen is that Iran
is trying to gain access to nuclear enrichment technology”” Nothing has changed
in the IAEA assessment.
This
dispute is an instant replay of the clashes between the IAEA and the US over the question of whether or not Iraq,
under Saddam Hussein,
was trying to develop nuclear arms. The claim that Iraq had or was developing nuclear weapons was
the primary excuse for the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The US,
of course, was lying. There were no such weapons anywhere to be found.
US
Congress member Ron Paul cautions that, “Iran has never in modern times
invaded her neighbors, yet we worry obsessively that she may develop a nuclear
weapon someday.”
Nonetheless,
the Project for a New American Century claims that Iran is “rushing to develop
ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention…”
While the
PNAC claim about Iranian intentions has no factual basis, it is also an open
admission that, if Iran were developing
a nuclear weapons capability, it would be for Iran’s own self defense in the
face of a pattern of US invasions in the region, including invasions and
occupations of Iraq on its western flank and Afghanistan on its eastern flank.
Iran has an obvious and legitimate
interest in deterring such “intervention.”
The
insanity of the Cold War, with its policies of deterrence and Mutually Assured
Destruction, almost starts looking like the good old days.
To get a
picture of the hypocritical extremity, even the absurdity of the US position on Iran,
imagine if you will an equivalent scenario: A Chinese invasion and military
occupation of Mexico to the
south of the US, and of Canada
to its north.
China then, bristling with military might on the US borders, begins, in this imagined scenario,
to issue threats against the US,
demanding it rid itself immediately of nuclear weapons, calling the US a threat to regional stability in the Americas.
Polls
show, then, that a majority of Chinese agree: if the US, a known international
war criminal and the only power to launch a nuclear attack against another
nation – ever – won’t unilaterally surrender its nukes and suspend operations
of its nuclear power plants, then US nuclear facilities, all of them, should be
taken out in a Chinese nuclear first strike.
The
difference in the two stories should be obvious: there is an absolutely solid
historical and factual basis for the Chinese charges against the US in this scenario: there is no factual basis
whatsoever for US claims against Iran.
Iran, like Iraq before it, has no nuclear
weapons, and there is zero proof that they are developing them. In Iran, just like in Iraq, there are only US
“suspicions” – the kind based in lies; lies that have already led to one
devastating war. Lies that serve today as the rationale for launching another.
Why They “Hate Us”:
Bringing “Regime Change” and “Democracy” to Iran
Larry Everest
suggests that “”it would be willful
disbelief to ignore the growing danger of a U.S.
attack on Iran.
One reason: its objectives are not limited to disarming Iran-its goal is regime change, as in Iraq.”
“[Seymour]Hersh reports that one former defense official told
him that “military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing
campaign in Iran
will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and
overthrow the government.”” A Pentagon adviser told Hersh,
“This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change
the power structure in Iran,
and that means war.” He said that the U.S.
was planning to “strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine percent
of them have nothing to do with proliferation.””
The Bush regime understands clearly that simply
obliterating Iran’s nuclear
energy infrastructure won’t solve the Empire’s strategic dilemma in Iran, any more than invading Iraq solved the imperial dilemma
there. So, Bush claims he wants to bring “democracy” and regime change to the
Iranian people, to “liberate” them from a repressive fundamentalist state.
But Iran
has direct experience with US sponsored “regime change,” and its people are
utterly unlikely to rise up against the nation’s leadership in support of a US
attack.
In the early 1950s the US
and Britain overthrew Iran’s elected, democratic government: its
elected leaders had determined to nationalize Iran’s oil.
Afterward, under the totalitarian reign of Shah Reza
Pahlavi, the US created one of the most brutal
absolute dictatorships and torture regimes of the 20th century.
Its instrument was the secret police agency SAVAK,
created and supplied by the CIA, and whose 15,000 agents were trained by Israel’s
Mossad and by the British.
SAVAK censored the media
and gathered intelligence, spying on every aspect of Iranian political life,
while annihilating political dissidents by assassination and execution. Amnesty International estimated
that there were as many as 100,000 political prisoners in Iran by 1976.
The methods of torture used
in SAVAK’s special prisons and torture chambers included
inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, brutally
pulling teeth and nails, beatings, anal rape, tying weights to the genitals,
electric shock, whipping, and many others.
Amnesty
reported that during the Shah’s reign Iran had “the highest rate of death
penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of
torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in
human rights than Iran.”
As one critic noted “Poverty,
despair, and torture defined the lives of Iran’s millions of citizens.” The US
backed and propped up the Shah to the bitter end, when mass uprisings in the
late 70s drove the ruler from power.
Eight U.S. administrations supported the
Shah with intelligence, military and economic aid. In return, the US received an apparently endless flow of cheap
oil, a strategic perch on the border of the Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf and
the Middle East, and a terrorized, subdued and “politically stable” populace in
Iran
itself.
Once the Shah was gone,
the US unleashed its Iraqi
puppet Saddam Hussein to launch a proxy war against Iran in a desperate bid to
destabilize and remove the new Iranian regime. It was one of the bloodiest wars
of the 20th century.
George
W. Bush now claims the Iranians are a backward people who hate the US for its
“freedoms.”
Armed with the facts,
one might conclude otherwise; that Iran has already experienced a US
sponsored “regime change” and that there are altogether different reasons why
any Iranian in her or his right mind would hate and
oppose the US Empire.
It
comes as no surprise that, having had their own democracy overthrown by the US,
Iranians would offer a flat “No” to US claims that it’s exporting “democracy”
and “freedom” rather than torture, degradation, poverty and regional dominion.
If
many Iranians want nothing to do with the West at all, that’s no wonder,
either.
What Makes for a Real “Terrorist State”?
It’s difficult to analyze claims that Iran
is a “rogue state” or a “state sponsor of terror.” So much depends on
definitions, and the definitions themselves depend on actual – not theoretical
– comparisons with the practices of other states. Another difficulty is the
depth of xenophobic, knee jerk conditioning of people in the West with respect
to Iran.
It’s been almost 30 years since the so-called Iran
hostage crisis, when, at the crescendo of the overthrow of the US sponsored
torture state of Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iranian students
seized the US embassy in Teheran, holding captive the US personnel whose job it
had been to support the dictator’s regime, and to assure its compliance with US
mandates.
The seizure of the embassy was precipitated by a
report from Radio Turkey
that yet another US sponsored coup was on the verge of overthrowing Iran’s
new leadership.
It’s been almost 30 years since radio stations in
the US
began playing the “novelty song” Bomb
Iran – to the tune of an old Beach Boys hit, Barbara Ann.
Rambo, Reagan and “Bomb Iran” were only the beginning.
The psycho-cultural stage for the entire development
of overt neo-fascism in the US
was established by the “humiliations” of Viet Nam
and the Iran
“hostage crisis.”
It is all but impossible to separate what the US has become from its relationship to Iran as its international opposite and “Other,”
just as it is all but impossible to separate white cultural psychology in the US
from its Black and Native American opposite and “Other.” Iran is, by every standard of the
white empire, the modern image of the anti-colonial “savage.”
This is the image of the international “savage” that
neo-cowboys like Ronald Reagan and Rambo set out to re-conquer in the popular
white imagination of the early 1980s, even as the rulers set about
re-conquering a rebellious Black population through the “War on Drugs” in the
wake of the Black Power Movement, and American Indians in the wake of Wounded
Knee. Thirty years later, these two groups, along with Chicanos, share the
distinction of suffering the highest incarceration rates of any peoples on
Earth.
All stigmas and stereotypes are used to tell a story
that justifies violence against a target. If Blacks are “criminals” and Indians
are “drunken” then Iranians are “terrorists” who
present a clear and present danger to white capitalist Western “civilization.”
And it is this simple image of “danger” that will ultimately be used to justify
a nuclear attack on Iran.
If you clutch your metaphorical purse when the word
“terrorist” comes walking down the sidewalk toward you, or gets on the elevator
with you, then the past thirty years of deliberate conditioning has impacted
you, and it’s going to be hard to speak with you objectively about Iranian
“terror.” It may prove impossible.
But there’s no risk quite like the risk of being
declared an unlawful enemy combatant, so with that proviso, let’s move forward.
First, for the sake of having a sense of proportion,
let’s talk about what really rates as international crimes that might,
properly, cause a nation to be deemed a rogue state, or a terrorist state.
In our list let’s include some of the universally
acknowledged crimes a state might sponsor: genocide, the use of death squads,
the widespread use of torture, the unprovoked or needless use of nuclear
weapons, the crime of Apartheid, spreading chemical and biological weapons to
those who use them to kill the innocent, the launching of unprovoked wars of
aggression, and, of course, the deliberate starvation of mass numbers of
civilians and the bombing of civilians. Since it’s germane, let’s include the
acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in violation of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty as a crime.
These are things I think any reasoning human would
agree are among the vilest of crimes a state is capable of, crimes against
humanity.
In terms of the commission of these kinds of
national and international crimes, the current regime in Iran hardly rates a nod. Jointly if
not singly, however, other players on the Middle East
stage are guilty of every crime listed. Every one of them.
The players in question are the US
and Israel.
US sponsored death squads committed genocide against
the Mayan Indians in Guatemala,
slaughtering 250,000 people in the 1980s.
The US
led sanctions in Iraq
in the 90s killed a million innocent civilians – half of them children. Edward
S. Herman has called it “possibly the greatest genocide of the post-World War
II era (with only the Congo
and Rwanda
serious rivals).”
The US
has trained torturers and sponsored torture around the globe – from Iran, to South
Africa to El Salvador
and Argentina.
Torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is routine.
The US
and Israel backed the
Apartheid regime in South Africa,
and Israel is still an
Apartheid state today, as the US
once was under Jim Crow. The US
has the world’s highest incarceration rate – and most of its imprisoned people
are peoples of color.
The US
has spread biological and chemical weapons to states like Iraq, and passed the matter off when Saddam
Hussein used them against the Kurdish minority of Iraq, and others.
The US
bombed Yugoslavian civilians for 78 straight days and backed Israel in its recent war crimes against Lebanon,
which targeted civilian populations, taking a special toll among children.
The US
has carried out dozens of unprovoked invasions, most recently including Iraq, Panama,
Grenada, and Haiti, but also including Mexico, the Phillipines,
Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic,
just to name a bare few. Israel
has invaded Lebanon, Syria, Egypt,
Palestine, and
every inch of land it sits on. The US, another white colonial settler
state, also invaded and occupied every square inch it sits on.
The US
is the only nation in history to have used nuclear weapons – and it used them
against civilians. Israel’s
nukes were acquired in gross violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
That’s what I mean by a sense of proportion. Nothing
that Iran
has done remotely compares to these
even one of these crimes. It practices nothing close to Apartheid, it’s
launched no wars of aggression – it’s invaded no one at all, it’s starved no
one, bombed no cities, sponsored no genocide, trained no torturers or death
squads, it’s seized no one’s land, exported no chemical weapons, has never used
a nuclear weapon, has none, and is in compliance with the Non-Proliferation
treaty.
But those who have committed just these crimes
against humanity label Iran
a rogue state and a terrorist state.
Sadly, the main thing Iran is guilty of is the same thing
it was guilty of in 1953: having too much oil, and intending to defend it.
The U.S. government has listed Iran as a sponsor of terrorism
since 1984. Typical of some of the main charges have been the following,
according to the Council on
Foreign Relations.
- In late 1979,
Iranian students thought to be backed by the government occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. They held fifty-two Americans
hostage for 444 days.
This was
an act of war and popular revolution, not terrorism. Most, if not all of the
embassy workers were actively complicit in crimes of the Shah against the
Iranian people. They were, in any case, hardly innocent bystanders.
- Observers say Iran had prior knowledge of Hezbollah
attacks, such as the 1988 kidnapping and murder of Colonel William
Higgins, a U.S. Marine
involved in a U.N. observer mission in Lebanon,
and the 1992 and 1994 bombings of Jewish cultural institutions in Argentina.
Attacks
against military targets are, by definition not terrorist attacks, they are
military attacks. The alleged Iranian links to the Argentinian
bombing have never been proven.
- Iran still has a price on the head of the Indian-born
British novelist Salman Rushdie for what Iranian
leaders call blasphemous writings about Islam in his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses.
Very
well, then, but is every state that targets a writer a state terrorist regime?
If so, the Bush administration’s going to have a lot of wars on its hands. Just
ask the worldwide association of writers, International PEN. Bush will need to
invade Turkey, China, Niger, and a dozen others. He”ll
also need to send in a commando unit to free Mumia Abu Jamal, an African
American writer on death row in Pennsylvania.
- U.S. officials
say Iran supported the group behind the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military residence in Saudi
Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen.
Iran has been accused of being behind the attack on US soldiers in Saudi Arabia
– although the matter has never been proven. But, again, US soldiers are by
definition a military target, not “innocents.”
Innocents don’t carry weapons or act as occupation
forces in foreign countries. For the same reason, and by definition, there can be
no such thing as a “terrorist” attack against the US
occupation forces in Iraq,
for example.
Is Iran
a criminal regime? Perhaps. Ask the Iranian people,
not George Bush.
Should theocracies be embraced? No. But those of us
in the West have our own emergent theocracy to combat: the one in Washington DC.
If the people of Iran
want to do battle with their theocracy, they will.
Can anything Iran has
done warrant reducing the nation to rubble, or attacking the Iranian people
with nuclear weapons? No.
Does Iran
have nuclear weapons? No.
Is it developing them? No. Not according to the
International Atomic Energy Agency.
Is Iran
a terrorist state? Ask the Mayan people of Guatemala,
the survivors of the death squads of El Salvador,
the survivors of Hiroshima or the free fire
zones of Viet Nam
for their answers.
Compare anything
Iran has done to the recent
Israeli / US bombing of Beirut.
There is, of course, a somewhat longer list of
claims against Iran,
the bulk of which relate to Iranian support for anti-Israeli resistance groups.
These are dealt with somewhat even-handedly in a piece by Gary Sick called Iran: Confronting
Terrorism, written for The Center for Strategic and
International Studies and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and published in The
Washington Quarterly.
None of the claims has much more substance than
those dealt with here, but for those inclined toward an academic source that
treats the matter with the requisite dispassion, it’s worth reading.
The Apocalypse Factor
“We will export death and
violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and
rid the world of evil.”
– George W. Bush, quoted by Bob
Woodward in Bush
at War
The
Apocalypse, The Revelation, The Uncovering, The Tribulation, The Affliction:
these and similar terms comprise a fundamental underlying cultural script that
weds Islam, Christianity and Judaism in a singular tale that explains history,
human purpose and the development of current events for believers.
The veil
of belief in Armaggedon hangs quietly behind
developments in the region: the Jewish prophecy of the War of Gog and Magog and of the Third Temple;
the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelations from the New Testament; and
Islam’s Return of the Mahdi.
Newspapers
across the globe carry the names of two leaders who have embraced the unfolding
of Christian and Islamic prophecies, the doom and the “victory” they foretell:
George Bush of the US and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. These men are believers. This
is their lens, how they make sense of the world and of their actions on the
world stage.
Biblical
fundamentalist and “End Times” preacher Jack Van
Impe writes that he “was contacted” by the Office
of Public Liaison for the White House and by the National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice to make an outline”
for Bush on matters pertaining to the End Times. “And I”ve spent hours
preparing it” it’s in his hands.”
Bush has
remarked, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then
he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did…” He believes that he
was “called” to be President.
Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, authors of The
Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, say that Bush reads the Bible every morning
and that it affects his decisions and the tone of his public comments.
Soon after Sept. 11, Bush
woke up and read Proverbs 21:15: “When justice is done, it brings joy to
the righteous but terror to evildoers.”
“For several weeks
after the attacks, he referred to the terrorists and their sponsors as
‘evildoers,’ with that passage firmly fixed in his mind,” the Schweizers report.
Max
Blumenthal recently wrote in The Nation,
“Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of off-the-record
meetings about its policies in the Middle East with leaders of Christians
United for Israel,” a new lobbying group headed by Texas televangelist John Hagee, author of Jerusalem
Countdown: A Warning to the World.
Hagee’s
book urges the US to launch
a first strike against Iran
in order to bring about the onset of Armageddon.
According
to Blumenthal, Haggee has said that the “only way to
defeat the Iranian evildoers” is a full-scale military assault” and that a
“coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty,” a
biblical certainty.
High
powered Republican Congress member Dick Armey recently admitted to
the BBC that both Bush and he are believers in the End Times, but denied that
they were trying to push the world toward an apocalyptic conflagration.
As a
presidential candidate in 2000, Bush submitted to a grilling by Tim LaHaye, co-author of the apocalyptic book series Left Behind, co-founder of the Moral
Majority, and a prime mover of the Christian Right. The Left Behind series has sold over 60 million copies; as Kathryn Joyce and
Jeff Sharlet have pointed out, “one in eight
Americans” is “reading all these strange books about the end of the world.”
According
to Richard Dreyfus in Rolling
Stone, LaHaye believes Saddam Hussein “is “a
servant of Satan,” possessed by a demon, and that he
could be “the forerunner of the Antichrist.””
Bush
passed muster with LaHaye, however, – no matter that
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would later call Bush “The Devil” – and his
approval by LaHaye was an utterly crucial step in
consolidating the Christian Fascist movement behind his candidacy.
The Biblical Apocalypse is the
Christian Fascist’s version of Hitler’s evocation of the ancient Nordic and
Germanic mythos under the Third Reich, and it serves the same purpose.
It
explains the chaos of the current world scene, creates an enemy that can be scapegoated for the chaos, and promises retribution to that
enemy and the re-establishment of a strictly repressive “right way” of living.
It projects and demands a world of sacrifice and war to achieve a new
“normalcy.”
The
Christian website Apocalypse
Soon promises that there is a “purpose” and a “final destination awaiting
all of us,” that can explain who we are, where we are going, where we are
heading and what it’s all about.
Judaism,
Christianity and Islam are all very explicit in telling us about the “final
destination,” the Final Solution each envisions for the common civilization in
which we are immersed.
In the
Jewish story “the whole world is to be destroyed, but Israel will be
delivered out of it.” In the Islamic story “the believers of Allah will be
hidden with the prophet Mohammad, followed by a “wind of destruction”
which will kill all the remaining people.” In the Christian version “the church
will be raptured (snatched away) and taken to be with
the Lord. God’s judgment will be poured out on the wicked of the earth”
(see Eschatology
Comparison).
In each,
god saves the “righteous,” grants them victory in this or that version of the
battle of Armageddon, and commits genocide against their enemies. That’s the
plan “god” has imparted to George Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, and to Jewish fundamentalists as well.
Iran‘s Ahmadinejad
is no less – and no more – a believer than Bush. He believes The Hour, as
Muslims call the End Times, is very near. Ahmadinejad, reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the Mahdi – very roughly the Shi”ite
equivalent of the Messiah – to arrive within two years, ushering in Armageddon
and The Hour. Ahmadinejad prayed openly for the
arrival of the Mahdi during his recent speech to the
UN General Assembly.
The most
dangerous of scripts is being played out – a coming war led by two opposing
apocalyptic fundamentalists, each convinced that god and all the logic of a
sick civilization is behind him, each believing god will initiate a global
genocide on his behalf, and each believing that The Hour is near.
It is
simple and obvious which of these two men is more dangerous.
Only one
of them has a nuclear arsenal that can destroy all life on Earth.
Stopping the War
There is no justification for war against Iran.
The coming war has nothing to do with Iran
as a “state sponsor of terrorism” or an Islamic state with nuclear weapons, but
everything to do with US strategic plans to seize control of the vast energy
resources of the region and military control of Central Asia and the Middle East.
The US intends to stay on top of the
world and prevent the rise of a rival bloc that might threaten its global
dominance and it means to do so at any price – including nuclear war and global
economic depression.
Nothing is unthinkable in
the pursuit of a consolidated world empire, not for Republicans, and not for
Democrats. The sharpest expressions of this imperial strategy are to be found
in the documents of the Republican’s Project for a New American Century
and in Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand
Chessboard.
But the
risks for the Empire are obviously huge.
According to Martin Walker of UPI, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cold feet over the regime’s plan for striking
Iran, while Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing all the harder for war. Walker writes, “This heralds the first important policy
breech between the triumvirate of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, sometimes known in Washington as “the iron triangle,”
in almost six years of the Bush administration.”
There’s
only one way to stop this war, and that’s to increase the global political
price the Empire will pay if it carries through, and to deepen the emerging
divisions within the Empire over its plans.
It’s up to us, and no one else.
_________________________
Juan
Santos is a Los Angeles based writer
and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/.
He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.