Bomb Iran? Support Iran?

I’m getting thor­oughly confused by the messages coming forth from our alabaster halls. Last week, Iranians were Democrats: steadfast, strong, brave, prin­ci­pled, heroic, rebel­lious, gallant. They were heroes, martyrs, women, children. They were certainly human beings, humanized, hence the last people on earth the United States would allow to be bombed out of the Stone Age.

Time flies!

This week, according to Joseph Biden, the Iranians are the Enemy. If recent reports are not only accurate but indica­tive of top gov­ern­men­tal policy, the Israelis shall have free reign to bomb Iranian nuclear pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties. Let’s recall that it is now commonly acknowl­edged that Israel’s (blatantly illegal) bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor probably caused the expansion and weaponiza­tion of the Iraqi nuclear program, and that Israeli has a possibly-illegal, certainly-undeclared nuclear arsenal, potent enough to turn the Middle East into a slick plate of fused glass. Never mind that; Israel is its own country, and can make its own decisions, up to and including vio­la­tions of Article 51, just like Poppa Bear, the United States. As Biden gingerly put it, only Israelis can determine if “they’re exis­ten­tially threat­ened” by an Iran in pos­ses­sion of nuclear weapons (it’s unclear why this isn’t an assess­ment amenable to rea­son­able dis­cus­sion, nor why a country suffering from Ira­nopho­bia would possess leaders likely to make a rea­son­able assess­ment of Iranian inten­tions). Ha’aretz writer Aluf Benn calls Biden’s statement a “veiled warning.”

At the moment, Israel is pondering pushing for  “crippling sanctions” against Iran, perhaps recalling their efficacy against the Hussein regime, during which it was com­pellingly suggested that “economic sanctions have probably already taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruc­tion in history.”

As Biden added, “if the Netanyahu gov­ern­ment decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that…That is not our choice.”  The U.S., he stressed, “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.” Unless that nation helped compose the wildly zig-zagging Axis of Evil, in which case it must not possess nuclear weapons, even though according to Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”

But then, as Edward Herman and David Peterson have pointed out, Israel, as a US satrapy, is one of the few countries pos­sess­ing aggres­sion rights, perhaps going along in a neat set with the new­fan­gled and idio­syn­cratic “right to exist,” not a right other states happen to have (a useful quibble wonders why rights inhere in states, and not in people, but I wander).

The New York Times editorial staff, grand­mas­ter ironists, chose yesterday to publish an article headlined “Obama’s Youth Shaped His Nuclear-Free Vision,” nearly side-by-side with the dis­clo­sure about Biden. Queer, the vagaries of American gov­ern­ment policy. Outside the minds of our thanophilic officials, things look a tad different. Out here, the Iranians are still human (even that minute per­cent­age of Iranian society that voted for Ahmadine­jad, too small in pre­vail­ing com­men­tary to merit ana­lyt­i­cal attention, something that merits its own exegesis to detail the sclerotic elitism of Western scrib­blers). This brings me to the last point: as Vijay Prashad, in his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally and totally sensical style wrote a couple days ago,  “It does not help for us to wave the flag of inter­ven­tion, or even to throw our support between one or the other camp in this current situation.” The flag to be waved is non–inter­ven­tion: as the UK Times Online reported several years ago, the con­se­quences of an Israeli attack on Iran would be hor­ren­dous: “Some analysts warned that Iranian retal­i­a­tion for such a strike could range from dis­rup­tion of oil supplies to the West to terrorist attacks against Jewish targets around the world.”

Or as an Iranian commented here a week ago: “This was neither a velvet rev­o­lu­tion or any other kind of rev­o­lu­tion … even if many were hoping it to be. And all of those screaming Iran’s name right now will either forget us in a week, or go back to trying to find a way to bomb us to rubble and ash.” Prescient.

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