It doesn't matter how you sell it...

It's still preemptive war on a sovereign nation, and it's just as illegal as the one we started in Iraq four and a half years ago...

Sy Hersh:

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran.

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

And it will still yield nothing but more misery for millions in the region as well as inflaming an already volatile situation and risking the spread of it across seas and oceans:

A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.”

All of this is not based on hard intelligence, but, like the hollow bellowings of 2002 about WMDs in Iraq and the empty trumpeting about an Iranian Nuclear weapons program in the past few years (in the face of the results of repeated arduous IAEA inspections pointing to exactly the opposite conclusion), the illusion of intelligence, broadcast with such volume and in such panic stricken tones to the general populace (by willing allies in the media and the administration) that the average citizen who is accustomed to being spoon fed anything and everything that they conceivably would need to think about or pretend to have thought about and developed an opinion on until the masses are squarely behind action. Never mind what the action is, or who the action is focussed on, or what the secondary and long term results of the action may be, action must be taken immediately.

Scott Ritter:

65% of the American public aren’t antiwar. They’re just anti-losing. You see, if we were winning the war in Iraq, they’d all be for it. If we had brought democracy, they’d be cheering the President. It wouldn’t matter that we violated international law. It wouldn’t even matter that we lied about weapons of mass destruction. We’d be winning. God bless America. Ain’t we good? USA, USA! But we’re losing, so they’re against Iraq.

But what happens when you get your butt kicked in one game? You’re looking for the next game, where you can win. And right now, we’re looking for Iran for a victory.

This is exactly the wrong path for us to even contemplate going down, and the scary thing is that we've already started down it:

Ritter again, in conversation with Amy Goodman:

Look, we’re already overflying Iran with unmanned aerial vehicles, pilotless drones. On the ground, the CIA is recruiting Mojahedin-e-Khalq, recruiting Kurds, recruiting Azeris, who are operating inside Iran on behalf of the United States of America. And there is reason to believe that we’ve actually put uniformed members of the United States Armed Forces and American citizens operating as CIA paramilitaries inside Iranian territory to gather intelligence.

Now, when you violate the borders and the airspace of a sovereign nation with paramilitary and military forces, that’s an act of war. That’s an act of war. So, when Americans say, “Ah, there’s not going to be a war in Iran,” there's already a war in Iran. We’re at war with Iran. We’re just not in the declared conventional stage of the war.


If the U.S. goes into Iran in an obvious and invasive manner any shred of political, and moral capital that may exist for it with the rest of the world will disappear like a snowball melting on a hot stove.

The best way for us to protect our troops is to bring them home and end our criminal occupation of a land that was a sovereign nation until we invaded it and destroyed any semblance of government and civil institution in the name of regime change and imperialism, not by illegally invading another nation on the potentially most convincing and polarizing pretext of the week.

The Walrus Weighs In

Permit me to utilize the Leatherneck Weapons Inspector to debunk him:

John Bolton:

I hope Iran understands that we are very serious, that we are determined they are not going to get a nuclear weapon capability, and unless they change the strategic decision they’ve been pursuing for close to 20 years, that that’s something they better factor into their calculations.

Scott Ritter:

When the Iranians operate their cascades for any significant duration of time, every single time, the cascades self destruct. This president's trying to tell us that we are at imminent risk from the Iranians. That this Nuclear program represents a real and imminent threat to the security of the United States of America. The Vice President is creating a sense of urgency. The Media is hyping up that we're one year away from a Nuclear armed Iran. I'm telling you right now, even if Iran has a covert Nuclear weapons program, which no one has demonstrated they have, they couldn't build a Nuclear weapon if they wanted to. They just don't have the technological capacity.

Now, how do we know all this? From the inspectors.

Contrary to popular belief, Iran has not kicked out the inspectors.

Iran is operating 100% in compliance with it's legal obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is permitted, under Article 4 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to enrich Uranium. We are demanding that Iran be denied that which it is legally allowed to do when we say it must suspend it's Uranium enrichment program.

But even more than this, we're told that the Iranians are "picking a fight," that they're "searching for a conflict."

Iran fought an eight year war with Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed. Their economy was devastated. They are just beginning to recover from that and they are going through a serious period of economic difficulty with high unemployment. This nation awash in a sea of oil spends 30 billion dollars a year to import gasoline because they don't have the refining capacity to produce indigenous gasoline. They're not looking for a fight. The last thing they want is a fight with the world's sole remaining superpower.

I don't really have anything to add except perhaps this:

NIR ROSEN:

I am skeptical that they are actually sending fighters to Iraq. I just don’t see the need for it. Iraqis are very well trained. [Iran] might be sending some weapons. But then again, there’s also a black market in weapons, so just because a weapon is Iranian doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily been sold by Iran.

Harsh, and yet...

rather telling.

This latest essay by Scott Ritter helps to clarify what the history behind the infighting between the Shia and the Sunni in Iraq is really all about.

It is a convoluted mess. You think that Biblical history of the evolution of Christianity and the bloody repression it faced in the early years following Christ's death is complicated? How about the Spanish Inquisition and the repercussions that it wrought? The Protestant movement and its subsequent migration of thousands of Europeans to the Americas, resulting in the extermination of hundreds of indigenous tribal peoples? The Crusades? The Rennaisance?

All of them significant and traceable to the modern day political, social and economic swamp we find ourselves mired in.

However, they all are comparable to the turmoil and strife that was ongoing between the peoples of the Middle East when we were still ignorant of their existence and ways, or worse yet, cognizant of their existence but dismissive of their social structure, which was as sophisticated as a Western model while also adapting its own distinct characteristics.

While long and quickly mind numbing to the average American reader (bear down when you feel your eyes start to cross, it's worth it) Ritter's essay provides a brief rundown of the vital splits that occurred within the Islamic religion resulting in the three major competing sects of the modern day: Shia, Sunni, and Wahabbi, following the death of Muhammad and the ensuing struggle for power at the top levels of the leadership of the Islam faith.

What this all boils down to is that we as Americans have no idea what the root causes of the violence between Sunni and Shia Iraqis are--and even if we did have the respect and take the time to do so we would throw up our hands and let them work it out between themselves. It's been being hashed out between various incarnations of the sects for over 1500 years, so why should they all of the sudden listen to a foreign power who is only really interested in stripping the land of its natural resources tell them how to solve their differences and govern themselves?

To put it into perspective, imagine if a huge foreign power came over to the U. S. and overthrew the current regime (an interesting concept in and of itself) and then tried to institute a form of government that had never been put into practice before; all the while looting the natural resources of the country, dismantling the national, state snd local institutions; leaving almost no public services intact and putting millions of people out of work. The resulting unemployment would manifest itself in the polarization of these suddenly unemployed individuals by various religious groups which have traditionally been at odds with each other. The result would be similar to what we are seeing in Iraq today, only on a much larger and messier scale (the polarized divides would, I'm sorry to say, develop more along an ethnic (I'm loathe to use the term racial--we're all members of the same race--the human race) lines, with minorities at odds with Caucasians and the occupying force).

The occupying force would no doubt be undereducated as to the nuances of the cultural and social history and fault lines of the American experience, from the marginalization of the native American peoples to the enslavement of Negros and other minorities to the war that was fought to restore the Union and secure the freedom of all people in the U. S. to the repression of all those minorities and the various forms that that repression takes up to the present day to the class marginalization that is rampant in the U. S. and so on and so on. Due to this ignorance, the occupying force would have nary a clue as to how to address the violence short of introducing more armed forces into the equation, resulting only in the further inflamation of the violence. Over time, however, the leaders of the various factions would recognize the fallacy in striking at each other as opposed to the occupying forces and begin calling on their followers to act against the occupying force as opposed to each other.

In short, whatever nation or force took on such a task would quickly discover that they had struck an active hornet's nest which they mistook for a beehive full of honey that they thought had been either abandoned or was full of hibernating bees that wouldn't mind all of the honey being "harvested". Further whacking of the nest and other methods of quelling the hornets would continue to prove fruitless. How they responded to this revalation is another matter entirely.