Obama is negotiating with
Iran. Now he encounters the neocon counterattack, seeking to stop the talks.
The neocons want to
strangle Iran. Why? Must Iran be throttled to protect Americans? Must Iran be
strangled to protect Israel? A “yes” answer to either question is senseless.
There is some disarray at
Obama’s highest levels. His own Treasury Secretary (Dan Cohen) and chief
negotiator (Wendy Sherman) ask Congress not to impose further sanctions, but
one hour later Cohen adds a bunch of companies to the sanctions list. McCain
and others in Congress again threaten new sanctions. Iran wisely says it will
continue the negotiations, despite these pinpricks. Obama says nothing and
bides his time. He has won some backing in Congress for negotiations, namely,
Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo.
The warmongers in
Congress are a serious menace to Americans. Their threat to Americans is far,
far greater than any known terrorist threat and certainly immensely greater
than any threat emanating from Iran. There is every opportunity to reduce any
conceivable nuclear threat of Iran, now or future, to zero, a nullity, nil.
The warmongers are dead set against such an action.
There is less of a clear
and tangible opening to eliminate the threat posed by the anti-Iran and
anti-peace warmongers who inhabit Congress and the Executive. They need to be
identified by name and removed from office. John McCain, Robert Menendez, Bob
Corker, and Mark Kirk are four speaking out lately against Iran.
Add Eric Cantor, who
unbelievably called the interim deal “dangerous”, when the U.S. made almost
no concessions whatever to Iran. He’s simply scared that a deal will
eventually be reached and a peace break out in which Israel’s status is
reduced and Iran’s raised.
Add Ed Royce, who didn’t
think the interim deal protected the U.S. and its allies (Israel presumably)
and called for ratcheting up sanctions. Add Eliot Engel, who wants Iran 100%
out of the uranium enrichment business, no matter what treaties allow it. Add
Michael McCaul, who thinks it’s dangerous to lift sanctions and who has
misrepresented the U.N. resolutions. Add Brad Sherman, who thinks the U.S.
should keep ratcheting up sanctions during negotiations. Sherman has
openly said that he wants sanctions
that will hurt the Iranian people.
These men are all indulging in wild exaggerations about the safety of
Americans being placed in jeopardy by Iran, with or without negotiations.
They are making irresponsible statements that totally ignore the concessions
that Iran is now making, has already made, and is proposing to make. These
men are stupidly ignoring the internal politics in Iran. These men are
holding on to irrational hatreds based upon the 1979 revolution, stirring
fear of Islamic terrorism while voting for aid to Islamic insurgents when it
suits the Empire’s power plays. These men are endangering the talks and the
prospects for peace. These men are proposing senseless policies, because any
country pushed into a corner is more, not less, likely to arm itself and then
to pose a real threat. These men are making every effort to scuttle Obama’s
negotiations with Iran.
Why? The only end game that their drive has is to reduce Iran to a
nonentity and a powerless country. That’s what they want. That can only be
done by violently overthrowing its system, i.e., by a costly war. And what
would such a war win for Americans? Generations of costly grief in an effort
totally to prevent the possibility of Iran’s having or developing a nuclear
weapon. This makes no sense when that country already is willing to negotiate
a commitment to that effect now. Why aim at reducing Iran to rubble when it
has no nuclear weapons program and, even if it did, poses no threat to
America?
The answer of these anti-Iran officials is to protect Israel. But that’s
not a sensible answer either, for many reasons. Israel has an abundance of
armed forces and a stockpile of nuclear weapons to defend itself. Israel is
not the 51st state of the Union. With the U.S. behind Israel, the U.S.
becomes the puppet that can be drawn into a serious war not of its own
making. No major power should have such an important decision as war being
contingent on what some minor country or ally does or does not do. Iran is
not building up armed forces to attack Israel. It could not defeat Israel
even if it wanted to or tried to.
The U.S. needs to extricate itself from that entire region, not get more
deeply involved in it. The Cold War is over. U.S. policy should be aimed at
peace with Russia and China, not antagonism, not military buildups at their
borders, not at controlling every country on their borders. The U.S. should
not be letting its foreign policy be shaped by Israeli influences and voting
blocs inside this country. The U.S. shouldn’t be supporting a government that
systematically adds territory and devalues Palestinians. The more that the
U.S. supports Israel, the less willing are the Israelis to find and sign on
to a stable peace in that region.
The blank check protection of Israel that has so often been voiced by
officials of the U.S. government is a senseless policy. That blank check
should not be so broad as to cover a U.S. policy of starting a major war on
Iran or trying to reduce Iran to a position of abject inferiority. Acting on
behalf of Israel to that extent buys nothing for Americans but costs them
dearly.
If the forcible suppression of Iran makes no sense in the face of Iran’s
desire to negotiate an end to its possible construction of a nuclear bomb,
why then are there so many anti-Iran voices seeking to scuttle the talks? I
believe that, while Israel and its lobby are very important reasons for
neocons, they are not the only reasons. The neocons want U.S. global
hegemony, and they think that this can be accomplished by military and
political means. They think that the U.S. is the sole superpower in the world
and should lever its status as such to expand its dominance. They are willing
to throttle Iran or any other country that stands in the way of this ancient
ambition for world control.
The Cold War ended in 1989. The Cold War order, built on global military
bases, the CIA, regional alliances, the IMF and World Bank, nuclear threats
and fear, lives on. This order lives on because it remains the basis of the
superpower status of the U.S. Useful only for those narrow and powerful
interests that serve and compose the empire, these institutions and
policies serve no useful purposes for Americans who form the broad
public. Economic stagnation is their consequence as resources are drained
into costly wars.
The old Cold War order has matured into an American-led Western Alliance
of which NATO and the EU are components. When NATO was not scrapped but
instead transformed into a European adjunct of the U.S. empire (1989 to 1995)
that was willing to expand its membership and make war in Yugoslavia, it
became an American-European joint venture. When it sent forces to Afghanistan
and invaded Libya, it showed its teeth, its reach and its ambitions.
The U.S. needs to end the War on Terror, which is an excuse for funding
military contractors, special forces, bloated military forces, drone wars,
revolutions, spy agencies, and militarization of domestic police.
The U.S. needs to scrap its grandiose ideas of building democratic states
in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere in the name of
anti-terror, stability, building up international institutions or any other
grand sounding goals. These are excuses for extending the empire that was
built during the Cold War.
There is no necessity and no need to strangle Iran for the sake of
protecting Americans or Israel. Neither is there any necessity or need to to
strangle Iran for the sake of global American hegemony, which is not a policy
of peace but a policy of expansionism backed by force.
Those voices in Congress and the Executive who want to dictate to Iran,
not negotiate with Iran, stand for policies that drain American resources and
sap the country, not strengthen it. Their policies of expansion expose
Americans to huge risks of being drawn into serious wars all over the planet.
Old Cold War alliances and commitments with Japan, South Korea and others
have not been cancelled or revised. Why not? It’s because these
representatives and officials are busy attempting to change the past era of
superpower confrontation into a new era of sole superpower dominance.
Their vision is one of controlling the world’s destiny according to their
own crude notions of how societies and states should be structured into a
world order. They are taking the old industrial and war-making ideas of
authority, hierarchy, bureaucracy, financial and military control to a new
level in which the U.S. employs these methods to create the U.S. world order.
Sanctions on Iran are part of their toolkit, and if that fails to achieve
their aims, then brute force explicitly remains their option. They are
acknowledged advocates of war if other methods fail.
If it’s prosperity that Americans want, then peace, not war, should be
U.S. policy. If Americans want to end the National Security state, they need
their government to end the Cold War’s institutions and renounce the empire
constructed during that episode in history.
