War Watch: Iran

With all the fussing and feuding over the “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Visits Columbia University” sideshow earlier this week, the herd journalists of our national news media largely overlooked a Senate vote three days later that may well serve as a license for military action against Iran’s noxious president and his nation.

David Bromwich provides the background in “Hillary Clinton Votes for War Again,” available at The Huffington Post Web site.

The vote in question was on a revised version of a measure called the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which passed 76-22.

Bromwich focuses on two troublesome provisions.

The first states “that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies.”

The inclusion of Hezbollah [Bromwich notes] deserves some notice. It is part of a larger attempt, already apparent in the Lebanon war of 2006, to manufacture an “amalgam” of all the enemies of Israel and the United States throughout the region, and to treat them all as one enemy. Those who believe in the amalgam will come to agree that many more wars by the United States and Israel are needed to crush this enemy.

The Kyl-Lieberman amendment’s second troublesome provision, according to Bromwich, is its designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is the largest branch of the Iranian military. By granting Vice President Cheney’s wish (a distant dream in 2005) to put the Iranian guard on the U.S. terrorist list, the Senate has classified the army of Iran as an army of terrorists. The president, therefore, as he follows out the Cheney plan has all the support he requires for asserting in his next speech to an army or veterans group that Iran is a nation of terrorists.

The group of senators who voted against the measure consists of 20 Democrats and 2 Republicans:

Biden (D-DE)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Dodd (D-CT)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Klobuchar (D-MN)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Sanders (I-VT)
Tester (D-MT)
Webb (D-VA)
Wyden (D-OR)

Hagel (R-NE)
Lugar (R-IN)

It is worthwhile noting that two of the dissenting Democrats — Biden and Dodd — are currently seeking their party’s presidential nomination.

Of two other Democrats engaged in the same quest, Bromwich has some pointed observations.

On Barak Obama, who was absent from the Senate vote:

In a speech in Iowa on September 12, he addressed by anticipation the matter before the Senate in Kyl-Lieberman: “We hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven’t even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear — loud and clear — from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.”

It is baffling that a man who spoke those words two weeks ago could not find the time or the resolve to cast his vote in a conspicuous test for authorizing war on Iran. This seems to be one more demonstration of Obama’s tendency never to take a step forward without a step to the side. As for his own message about Iran, it has not been “loud and clear,” but muffled, wavering, experimental.

And on Hillary Clinton:

With Hillary Clinton, we know where we stand. [On September 26] she voted to bring the country a serious step closer to war against Iran. And she did so for the same reason that she voted to authorize the war on Iraq. She thinks the next war is going to happen. She hopes the worst of its short-term effects on America will have died down before the election. She suspects the media and voters will show more trust for a candidate who supported than for one who opposed the war. She wants a ponderous establishment of American troops and super-bases to remain in the Middle East for years to come. If she wins the presidency, she will inherit the command of that army and those bases, and she believes she can manage their affairs more prudently than George W. Bush.

Hillary Clinton is consistent. Every move is calculated, her actual intentions are masked, but the total drift is easy to comprehend...

— Barnett Axelrad

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“America’s Moral Menopause”

That’s the title of an article in the April 19 on-line edition of al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading daily newspaper.

The article starts off:

For almost 200 years, the US has claimed the moral high ground in world affairs. As it prospered, it looked on a wretched global scene of war, poverty, dictatorship, conquest, exploitation, colonial rule and the denial of human rights. Imbued with a new sense of global power following allied victories in World War I and World War II, the US soon changed from the acclaimed position of moral guru to that of the scion of imperial power. When the US withdraws from Iraq in defeat it will leave the Middle East/Gulf region in a state of unparalleled chaos and instability, a political vacuum remaining that not even massive US military presence in the region could fill. It has unleashed forces it cannot control and is trying to contain them by maintaining a decrepit status quo. The short-lived American empire is inexorably entering its period of political and moral menopause. It would do the US, and the turbulent world it has created, well if it retreated from its failed ideology of neo-conservatism into an era of neo- isolationism.

I never thought I’d find in al-Ahram with which to agree. But that’s what six years of George W. Bush can do to you.

The entire article is here.

— David Gradis

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Jaw-Jaw — or War-War?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a lot of heat from the Bush administration and its flaks over her visit to Syria.

Some critics took her to task for having her own foreign policy, as opposed to the “official” one set by the president.

Others decried the fact that she traveled to a country that is on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

To the first set of critics, M.J. Rosenberg, director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center, provided a pointed rejoinder in his April 6 column:

Heaven forefend! Things are going so swimmingly in the Middle East that the last thing anyone needs is for the 3rd highest official in the United States trying to resuscitate diplomacy.

But it makes no sense to refuse categorically to talk with your “enemies.” After all, it’s your “enemies” with whom you ultimately have to make peace — not your friends.

Few of Pelosi’s critics, Rosenberg noted, can rationally have any qualms about what she reportedly said to Syria’s President Bashar Assad:

that he should stop making trouble in Iraq and Lebanon, that the Israeli government is ready for negotiations, that Israel has no bellicose intentions toward Syria and that Syria should use its influence to free Israeli prisoners.

All in all, Rosenberg concluded, Pelosi’s trip was “a gutsy move”: It “strengthened America’s position in the region, and likely helped Israel on prisoners, on Hezbollah, and in its effort to avoid another war like last summer’s.”

Claude Salhani, UPI’s international editor, stuck it to Pelosi’s second set of critics by recapping a few highlights of times when the US has deemed it necessary and useful to hold talks with nations or groups with which it was engaged in hostilities:

• At the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union established a “hot line” telephone link between Washington and Moscow so that their leaders could “communicate and ... avoid having a crisis grow into a reason for a major confrontation.”

• During the Vietnam War, US officials held talks with both North Vietnamese and Vietcong representatives.

• In Iraq, US officials have negotiated with Sunni “insurgents,” even as Sunni groups engage US troops in combat.

The Bush administration’s fixation with channeling John Wayne-like “strong, silent type” movie machismo demonstrates that it would rather have conflict than resolve conflict.

At some point, you’ve got to talk with your “enemies.” After all, it’s your “enemies” with whom you’ve got to make peace — not your friends.

— Adam Simms

Is Syria next for Bush’s WMD treatment?

The following item is circulating care of something called Middle East Newsline. This excerpt from an undated dispatch was forwarded by Middle East Web.

Given the U.S. Department of Defense's recent history of “piping” and “cherry-picking” intelligence to support outcomes the Bush administration desires, perhaps it deserves to be treated with skepticism — a case of the boy who cried “Wolfowitz.”

SYRIA DEVELOPS BIO-WEAPONS

WASHINGTON [MENL] — Syria has advanced in efforts to produce biological missile warheads.

The U.S. intelligence community has determined that the regime of President Bashar Assad was developing an infrastructure for biological weapons production. Officials said Assad has advanced the BW program through help from China and North Korea.

“Syria’s biotechnical infrastructure is capable of supporting limited biological agent development,” Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Maples said. “DIA assesses Syria has a program to develop select biological agents.”

Maples said Syria has sought to install biological and chemical warheads on its missile arsenal. He said the programs were meant to deter Israel’s conventional force superiority.

— Barnett Axelrad