Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Dave Lindorff
This is madness!
I wrote last September that Bush was gearing up for war with Iran, as evidenced by the moving up of the deployment date of the carrier group headed by the recently re-fueled and re-armed USS Eisenhower, some of whose crewmembers had leaked that its mission was to attack Iran.
At the time, there was considerable skepticism expressed about the article, which appeared in the Nation’s online edition.
Now, four months later, it is widely assumed in Europe that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran, and even in the U.S., members of Congress are openly talking about their concern that Bush is planning to attack Iran.
Does anyone think this is lunacy?
The U.S. is deeply mired in a losing war in Iraq, and is also losing Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban. The Pentagon is scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with the measly 21,500 additional troops Bush has vowed to send to Iraq, and the 4000 troops that his commanders in Afghanistan are asking for.
Iran, meanwhile, poses no immediate threat to the U.S. But it does have a huge, battle-hardened army, much better equipped than Saddam Hussein’s rag-tag troops, and equipped with some very sophisticated weaponry courtesy of Russia and China. Any U.S. forces that went into Iran could expect to take heavy casualties, and could hardly hope to conquer a nation with a population bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined—a population that, unlike Iraq’s—can be expected to rise as one against a US invasion.
Even if Iran is meddling in Iraq, it hardly seems like attacking that country is likely to put a halt to that kind of thing. Indeed, attacking Iran would be more likely to lead to an escalation of Iranian efforts to hobble U.S. forces in Iraq—something Tehran could easily do through its Iraqi Shia allies.
Nor would attacking Iran put an end to that nation’s nuclear program, which is spread out, carefully hidden, and in many cases located in underground bunkers. Nuclear experts agree that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would only slow down its efforts, not end them, and moreover, would encourage the country to redouble its efforts to get the Bomb and achieve the kind of protection against future attack that countries with the bomb have.
Oh. I haven’t mentioned the economic disaster part, have I?
Iran is the second largest oil producing country in the world, and it borders the entire eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s oil passes every year. If it was attacked, all of Iran’s oil, and most of the oil produced by Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, would be taken out of circulation indefinitely. Oil prices would soar way past $100/barrel, and maybe past $200 a barrel, causing a U.S. and a global depression.
So why are we even talking about this?
We’re talking about this because the President of the United States, the Vice President, and the neoconservative political gang that has brought the nation six years of war, destruction and Constitution-wrecking, is under attack, and this cabal of madmen and mad women has decided that chaos, death and destruction offers the best hope of salvation.
We are, it appears, about to witness the American equivalent of Hitler’s suicide orders to the German people as he scurried to his bunker in Berlin.
What to do? The answer is simple.
It is time for the Congress, and the American people, to act.
If Senators and Representatives pass a resolution barring the use of any military forces against Iran, or the expenditure of any funds for war against Iran, Bush will not be able to push the country over the precipice. American military leaders would have reason to ignore any orders that would put them in violation of the law of the land.
This would be a historic moment—a reassertion by Congress of its Constitutional primacy in matters of war and peace.
Members of Congress should follow up that move by initiating impeachment proceedings against this whacko immediately.
Congress must not duck its patriotic duty. President Clinton was impeached for a little blowjob. This president wants to blow a hell of a lot more than an intern.
An attack on Iran would be an international crime under the Nuremberg Charter, which calls the invasion of a country that doesn’t pose an immediate threat a “Crime Against Peace.” But even aside from such matters, anyone with a lick of sense knows that it would be crazy to go into another even larger war while the American military is completely tied down in two other desperate situations.
The whole Bush administration has clearly gone stark raving mad, and is willing to sacrifice the nation for its own short-term gain.
This cannot be allowed to happen.
No War against Iran!
Impeach the President now!
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