Iran Watch: Tehran Willies

George W. Bush may have gotten a thumpin’ in November’s midterm elections, but there are signs that the Bourbons in and around the White House have forgotten nothing and learned nothing from their Iraq quagmire, and have now set their sights on Iran. Chief among this clueless crowd are their cheerleaders among our domestic neocons and their extreme hard-right Israeli acolytes who are now beating their war drums for the U.S. to make the same mistake all over again.

Exhibit A. Joshua Muravchik’s article in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy entitled “Operation Comeback,” which is cast in the form of a memo “To: My Fellow Neoconservatives” about “How to Save the Neocons.”

Early on, Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, acknowledges that both the Bush administration and the neocons “were glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation.” But nothing, it seems, is capable of defeating neocon hubris. Rather than finding that experience a reason to display greater humility — much less to call for scaling back or pulling out of Iraq — he’s off to launch the next war.

“Make no mistake,” Muravchik half prophesies, half prescribes, “President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office . . . Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there.” And what role should neoconservatism’s armchair generals play in preparing for Armageddon? Enlist their sons and daughters in the military? Nah. Cheerlead from the sidelines, as they have always done, of course: “We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes.”

Neocons pride themselves on being “realists,” no matter how cold-blooded and crackpot their so-called “realism” may be, and so Muravchik seems almost rational when compared with his Israeli counterparts. Take for example Exhibit B: Michael Freund, an aide to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose essay, “A Faith-Based Appeal to President Bush,” appeared in New York’s Jewish Press on Nov. 1.

Writing to the Decider as “one man of faith to another,” Freund apparently figures that an administration given to faith-based science and faith-based economics might just as easily adopt a faith-based foreign policy, too.

“I appeal to you now . . . ,” Freund wrote, “please strike Iran hard with military force, and dismantle their nuclear weapons program before it is too late.

“I know you believe, as I do, that God guides the destiny of men and of nations. And I know you believe, just as I do, that He raised you up to the helms of power precisely at this critical period, to serve as His agent and His instrument in this world.”

After advising “God’s agent” not to pay attention to “the opinion-mongers at The New York Times,” Freund reassures “His instrument”: “The one and only verdict — the one that really, truly counts — is the one penned in Heaven, by He Who gave each of us life. It is to Him, and Him alone, that we will all have to answer. . .

“Remember the promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis chap. 12: ‘I will bless those that bless you, and those that curse you I shall curse.’

“Note that when it comes to standing with Israel and the Jewish people, there is no middle ground. God delineates two categories and two categories only: those who bless Israel and those who curse it.”

Freund, however, need not worry — if Seymour Hersh’s article, “The Next Act,” in The New Yorker’s Nov. 17 issue is accurate. Heeding the adage that God helps those who help themselves, Israel apparently is up to its elbows in “helping” the Bush administration with Iran.
Item: Hersh reports that Israel is providing a Kurdish resistance group with “equipment and training” to make undercover raids into Iran (though, he notes, Jerusalem denies any involvement).

Item: Israeli personnel have cooperated with U.S. counterparts to station radiation-detection equipment close to Iranian sites suspected of producing nuclear-weapons components (though no appreciable radioactivity has been detected).

Item: Last summer Israel passed along a report that its agents operating in Iran had determined that the Iranians had produced and tested a device to trigger a nuclear explosion.
A former U.S. intelligence officer told Hersh that the Israeli tip, though sensational, was unverifiable: “We don’t know who the Israeli source is . . . there are no diagrams, no significant facts. Where is the test site?”

Nonetheless, the former official noted, hardliners within the White House latched onto the Israeli report as proving “the White House’s theory that the Iranians are on track” in developing a nuclear weapon.

But by far the most revealing insight contained in Hersh’s article is a quote from Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy defense minister, who in November acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post that the greatest threat Israel faces at the moment is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mouth, rather than Iran’s nuclear development program. Said Sneh (quoting from Hersh):

“The danger isn’t so much Ahmadinejad’s deciding to launch an attack but Israel’s living under a cloud of fear from a leader committed to its destruction. . . . Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will . . . I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”

In 2003, the Bush administration stampeded Congress and compliant mainstream news media into going to war with Iraq after Colin Powell flashed photos of “mobile WMD laboratories” to the UN General Assembly. When the US military finally caught up with those “laboratories,” they turned out to be trailers — the kind that could have been shipped back to the States and retrofitted to provide housing in New Orleans for homeless refugees from Hurricane Katrina.

What the Bush administration, the neocons and jittery Israelis will never acknowledge, and what all too many American seem only vaguely to remember, is that there were no weapons of mass destruction in those trailers because Saddam Hussein had dismantled whatever WMD programs he’d had under the grinding pressure of a decade of internationally imposed economic sanctions.
True, the sanctions regime was porous, subject to corruption on the part of many of those nations that signed on to restrict or forbid trade with Iraq, and took a heavy toll on ordinary Iraqis. But it worked. Neocons and Israeli hardliners will never acknowledge this last fact because their worldviews are at once simplistic and apocalyptic.

If Iran produces a bomb, it could be a real danger to regional and world peace, given the regime currently ruling that nation. But before the U.S. or anyone else decides to launch another war in order to respond to that possibility, we would do well to remember — and to remind the White House and Congress — that nonviolence, in the form of sanctions, made it unnecessary to go to war with Iraq to dismantle its weapons program. And that the only thing we have accomplished by going to war in Iraq is to make this troubled world a more dangerous place.

— Adam Simms