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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You’re a secret zionist agent!
Biden’s statement is a slap in the face, to the people in the streets, fighting for democratic rights in Iran. These people are for the right od Iran to have nuclear power. Not only the mullahs are pro nuke in Iran.